Steps to reproduce

Steps provided are for Windows 11, but initial problem found in Ubuntu 20.04

Update 2022-01-04: Corrected repro steps and added more environment details

1. Set up simple repo with following structure (all files can be empty):

root_dir/
|--src/
|----project/ # Notice the missing __init__.py
|------file.py # It can be empty, but I added `import os` at the top
|----__init__.py

2. Open a command prompt
3. cd root_dir
4. python -m venv venv
5. venv/Scripts/activate
6. pip install pylint astroid==2.9.1 # I also repro'd on the latest, 2.9.2
7. pylint src/project # Updated from pylint src
8. Observe failure:

src\project\__init__.py:1:0: F0010: error while code parsing: Unable to load file src\project\__init__.py:

Current behavior

Fails with src\project\__init__.py:1:0: F0010: error while code parsing: Unable to load file src\project\__init__.py:

Expected behavior

Does not fail with error.

If you replace step 6 with pip install pylint astroid==2.9.0, you get no failure with an empty output - since no files have content

python -c "from astroid import __pkginfo__; print(__pkginfo__.version)" output

2.9.1

python 3.9.1
pylint 2.12.2

This issue has been observed with astroid 2.9.1 and 2.9.2