[R-SIG-Mac] Apparent interaction between XQuartz and the Catalina (10.15) macOS upgrade

[Bob Rudis]

I've been running Catalina since the first beta and upgraded to GM the day of release. Apart from having to stick R things into Full Disk Access I've had no issues with R nor XQuartz.

I read through the links provided and, while I do have said symlink in the relocated items folder Apple creates (this is new behavior for the GM), it gets re-created fine for me & XQuartz works fine (and the minor pkg deps I have installed that use it also work fine.

This would appear to be a YMMV situation.

-Bob

> On Oct 8, 2019, at 4:19 PM, Luis Puerto <luiss.puerto using gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Thanks a lot for the heads up! 
> 
> Cheers!
> Luis
> 
>> On 8 Oct 2019, at 22:49, Marc Schwartz via R-SIG-Mac <r-sig-mac using r-project.org> wrote:
>> 
>> Hi All,
>> 
>> Perhaps I missed something relevant along the way someplace, but I ran the upgrade to Catalina (10.15) last night. I wanted to give folks a heads up on an issue that you may face, especially if you have XQuartz installed alongside R.
>> 
>> One of the sequelae of the upgrade is that some files may get relocated during the upgrade, likely in part due to the macOS SIP.
>> 
>> In my case, this involved the symlink for XQuartz, 'usr/X11R6', which gets placed into a "Relocated Items" folder on the Desktop. That folder, which is actually an alias to /Users/Shared, contains a folder tree with: Security/usr/X11R6. Naively, after seeing this, I elected to move the entire folder to the Trash.
>> 
>> That led me into a cycle of trying to figure out how to then delete that folder tree from the Trash, as I would get various OS errors in the course of doing so.
>> 
>> That led me to some Google searches, with incremental attempts at solutions, but eventually landing on the following thread in the Apple Community forums:
>> 
>> https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250712783
>> 
>> After the first review of the thread there, and before user 'faikbey' posted a possible solution using Recovery Mode, I filed an Issue on the XQuartz github repo here:
>> 
>> https://github.com/XQuartz/XQuartz/issues/1
>> 
>> It would seem that, at some level, one workaround would be to uninstall XQuartz fully before the Catalina upgrade, but there is no uninstall program provided by them. There is a series of CLI commands in a github gist here:
>> 
>> https://gist.github.com/pwnsdx/d127873e24cef159d4d603accaf37ee4#file-gistfile1-txt
>> 
>> which appears to work, but would likely be best used prior to the Catalina upgrade, and then re-install XQuartz after the upgrade is complete.
>> 
>> The solution to the problem posted by 'faikbey' in the Apple forum appears to work in the original scenario, albeit, as I noted in my reply in that thread, I needed to first mount the user volume in Recovery Mode using Disk Utility, before I could proceed with the additional steps of deleting the files from the Trash, then rebooting into normal mode. 
>> 
>> If anyone else has experienced this and knows of an alternative/better solution, let us know.
>> 
>> Otherwise, let's see what the XQuartz folks might come up with on this, as this was not an issue with prior macOS upgrades.
>> 
>> Regards,
>> 
>> Marc Schwartz
>> 
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