[GNC] since Catalina, unable to open gnucash

[GWB]

Apple OS X combined two types of kernels, bsd and mach, but is
(according to some FreeBSD kernel developers) progressively removing
the mach kernel components.  This may be due to their possible shift
to ARM processors for computers (same family of processors as their
other devices).  But Apple does not, that I can see, adhere to any
particular kind of standards for directories, user or otherwise.
"/opt" on OS X is often a hack to get alternative package managers to
work (like brew and others).  This also applies to the use of
permissions.  A very limited exposure to Catalina leads me to believe
they have attempted to secure and harden their permissions scheme, but
I can't tell if they (and SIP) follow the pattern of bsd's, vax/vms,
solaris, etc.  As you point out, disabling SIP is probably a bad idea,
but nice of Apple to provide csrutil anyway.

So give Apple time and they may more closely resemble bsd's ("other
bsd's"? who knows) at some point.  Apple, like FreeBSD, is POSIX
compliant, but FreeBSD has a compatibility layer that handles linux
binaries (pretty simple: kldload linux, kldload linux64, ten necessary
libraries).  I don't think Apple makes it that easy.

Does Catalina no longer provide a disk utility option to "fix" the
permissions?  Or does SIP obviate that?  I notice that Catalina (maybe
back to El Capitan) has (characteristically) changed to a disk
container system without calling it lvm2.

Blame AT&T for the less than clear descent into unix, bsd, solaris,
linux, etc.  They litigated against BSD, the University of Califorina
Regents fought them off, and now, technically, only AT&T and licensees
can use "unix" as a name.  BSD (same code base) went on to start the
wonderful world of OS's we see now.

Gordon

On Sun, Jan 26, 2020 at 1:16 PM John Ralls <jralls at ceridwen.us> wrote:
>
> Not only that, while Darwin (the underlying unix core of all Apple operating systems) is BSD Unix, it is *not* Linux and doesn't subscribe to the Linux Foundation or Free Desktop standards.
>
> Not that that matters. I just created /opt on my Mac running Catalina, changed the privs to 777, and saved-as then loaded a book with GnuCash. I had at first set GnuCash to have full-disk access, but revoked it and was still able to load the file, so whatever the OP's problem is it isn't having the file in /opt, nor is it about SIP which I leave enabled. Disabling SIP is only needed as a last resort when doing something that requires changing the library load paths (e.g. using $DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH) with a system program (e.g. bash). It's vastly safer to copy the system program into a user directory (I use ~/.local/bin) so that SIP won't mess with it. Regardless, it has nothing at all to do with users running GnuCash.
>
> A far more likely cause of the OP's problem is that permissions on /opt have gotten changed so that he no longer can write to the directory. I would expect that if he knows how to create /opt he also knows how to fix that as well as to ensure that it's backed up with Time Machine and whatever cloud backup service he uses.
>
> Regards,
> John Ralls
>
> P.S. Bruce Schuck, when you reply to a digest please remember to change the subject back to the original for the particular message to which you're replying.
>
> > On Jan 26, 2020, at 9:58 AM, Adrien Monteleone <adrien.monteleone at lusfiber.net> wrote:
> >
> > But /opt isn’t for user data files according to that standard. The user’s own data should still be under their /users tree.
> >
> > For example, you could build LibreOffice and store it in /opt, but your individual documents would be under /users. (/home in the linux tree)
> >
> > I’d say the simpler and safer solution (rather than disabling SIP) is to relocate the data files to the /Users area where there are no permissions issues.
> >
> > Regards,
> > Adrien
> >
> >> On Jan 26, 2020 w5d26, at 11:46 AM, Bruce Schuck <bschuck at asgard-systems.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> On 1/26/20 09:00, D <sunfish62 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> >>
> >>> And yet, still unanswered is why a user would put their data files into /opt in the first place...
> >>
> >> Because OSX is under the hood is very similar to *Nix and BSD systems.
> >> Those who are putting their data files under /opt are probably doing so
> >> to follow the Linux Hierarchy Standard. As a long time *Nix geek (first
> >> introduced to Unix on Gould computers running Gould UTX and AT&T 3B2
> >> systems running AT&T Sys V sometime around 1986/1987). Simple answer,
> >> because they can and they want to. :)
> >>
> >> See http://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/FHS_3.0/fhs/index.html for
> >> reference.
> >>
> >> I mentioned trying "csrutil disable" because I have not yet updated to
> >> Catalina. Seems it breaks a few things at the office, mainly Cisco
> >> Anyconnect. Worth a shot I thought. But as someone else mentioned, Apple
> >> has added layer of filesystem complexity that could be affecting access
> >> to /opt. I found this:
> >> https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/367158/whats-system-volumes-data/367159#367159
> >> and https://nektony.com/duplicate-finder-free/folders-permission
> >>
> >> - Bruce S.
> >
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