[GNC] MacOS Catalina Gnucash 3.7 won't start

[John Ralls]

No AppleScript will affect a Gtk application's coordinates, Gtk manages the screen itself and gets each monitor's coordinates from Quartz Display Services. No matter, that's not the problem:

The spindump says that GnuCash hasn't even started. It's hung in AppleSystemPolicy::waitForEvaluation. Unfortunately neither Google nor developer.apple.com have any information about what that means.

Has the Gatekeeper dialog displayed on any of your attempts to start GnuCash? That's the one saying "Verifying Gnucash.app" with a progress bar.

One thing to check is that you have "App Store and identified developers" selection on the General tab of System Preferences>Security & Privacy. I'd expect that you'd get a dialog box saying that GnuCash isn't from the App Store if you don't, but that's the area where it's having trouble. Another thing to try is on the Privacy tab: At the bottom of the list is "Developer Tools". I don't know if that't there because I have Xcode installed, but if you have it it offers the option to run software from Terminal that doesn't meet the system's security policy. I don't have it set on my system and don't have any trouble running GnuCash, but setting it on yours might produce some more information.

Regards,
John Ralls


> On Oct 28, 2019, at 7:07 AM, Chris Martin <clm1492 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Dear David and John,
>      Thanks for the suggestion.  I do in fact regularly use multiple external monitors.  On the off chance that matters, I unplugged them all and went to just my main laptop screen only.  Repeated all my tests and gnucash is still sleeping and unresponsive (with no windows).  In case there were windows that were hidden, I asked the finder to show all windows (reponse: no available windows).  On the off-chance that they just had coordinates that took them offscreen I found an applescript that changes the coordinates of all windows to put them within the main screen, still no joy.
>      Separately, I sent a message to John with the output of the spindump but I won't flood the whole group by attaching that here.
> 
> Thanks again,
>      Chris
> 
> On Mon, Oct 28, 2019 at 5:18 AM David T. <sunfish62 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
> Chris,
> 
> Any chance you have or had a second monitor on your system?
> 
> On Mon, Oct 28, 2019 at 8:42, John Ralls
> <jralls at ceridwen.us> wrote:
> Chris,
> 
> Weird. With GnuCash (sort of) running, open /Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor. Find gnucash in the process list and select it. Click the gear icon at the left end of the toolbar and pick "spindump" from the menu. It will collect for a few seconds and then present a window with a bunch of stack traces that may show what GnuCash is waiting for.
> 
> Regards,
> John Ralls
> 
> 
> > On Oct 27, 2019, at 4:53 PM, Chris Martin <clm1492 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 
> > Thanks Chris and John,
> >    I can confirm that in System Preferences->Security &
> > Privacy->Privacy->Files and Folders Gnucash is shown as "Full Disk Access"
> > as a result of me adding it to the Full Disk Access list earlier in my
> > debugging.  Out of curiosity, I removed it from the Full Disk Access list
> > and it made no difference.
> >    After returning it to "Full Disk Access," I then added the "--nofile"
> > option to ./Gnucash (and then again in addition to --debug and --extra) and
> > Gnucash still just hangs with no stdout or stderr output and *without*
> > generating a trace file.  Running a ps seems to show that the process is
> > just sleeping.
> > 
> > 25294 s000  S+    0:00.00 ./Gnucash --nofile
> > 
> >  I tried a kill -9 in addition to a kill -2 to get it to write a trace
> > file, but no joy.
> > 
> > 
> > -Chris
> > 
> > On Sun, Oct 27, 2019 at 12:37 PM chris graves <mohavebaked at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 
> >> Chris,
> >> 
> >> Under System Preferences->Security & Privacy->Privacy->Files and Folders,
> >> does Gnucash.app have access to the Documents Folder (or the folder where
> >> your Gnucash data file lives?
> >> 
> >> Also, try again running from the terminal and add the --nofile option
> >> 
> >> Chris
> >> 
> >> On Oct 27, 2019, at 12:17 PM, Chris Martin <clm1492 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> 
> >> ./Gnucash --debug --extra
> >> 
> >> 
> >> 
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