[GNC] MacOS Catalina Gnucash 3.7 won't start

Mon Oct 28 23:53:40 EDT 2019

Dear John,
     SOLVED.   Thanks for the pointers, your comment that gnucash was stuck
waiting for something else to happen got me wondering what else might be
pending in the MacOS and eventually led to the solution.  My anti-virus
software (Webroot Secureanywhere) wasn't yet working on Catalina.  It had
popped up a dialog box saying it was having trouble, but that dialog box
was hidden since there was nothing I could do about it (while I waited for
a fix from them) and dismissing or killing the antivirus software would
just cause it to respawn and reopen the dialog box. However, that dialog
box was preventing apple from popping up a new dialog box asking if it was
ok to run an application (gnucash) that had not been downloaded from the
app store.  Once Webroot was thoroughly killed, apple's question about
gnucash could come up and once that dialog box was approved, gnucash was
able to run successfully.  I hadn't connected the dots since every other
application I was running had been unaffected by this pending dialog box
issue.
     Thanks to you and everyone else for your help!

-Chris

On Mon, Oct 28, 2019 at 12:30 PM John Ralls <jralls at ceridwen.us> wrote:

> 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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