KiCad won't create new projects on MacOS Catalina 10.15 (19A487m).

[David Hall]

Hi.

Im running MacOS Catalina 10.15 (19A487m) . This has general launch in around September.
Program starts but when I create a new project KiCad crashes. I can load demo projects and they run, which makes me suspect it’s an access issue. I know that new version of MacOS isolates the file system from applications and there are rules about where you can access files from.

I have gone into System Preferences\Security & Privacy and given KiCad.app full disk access and restarted Mac.

regards

David

Application: kicad
Version: (5.1.2-1)-1, release build
Libraries:
wxWidgets 3.0.4
libcurl/7.64.1 SecureTransport (LibreSSL/2.8.3) zlib/1.2.11 nghttp2/1.38.0
Platform: Mac OS X (Darwin 19.0.0 x86_64), 64 bit, Little endian, wxMac
Build Info:
wxWidgets: 3.0.4 (UTF-8,STL containers,compatible with 2.8)
Boost: 1.69.0
OpenCASCADE Community Edition: 6.9.1
Curl: 7.54.0
Compiler: Clang 9.0.0 with C++ ABI 1002
Build settings:
USE_WX_GRAPHICS_CONTEXT=ON
USE_WX_OVERLAY=ON
KICAD_SCRIPTING=ON
KICAD_SCRIPTING_MODULES=ON
KICAD_SCRIPTING_PYTHON3=OFF
KICAD_SCRIPTING_WXPYTHON=ON
KICAD_SCRIPTING_WXPYTHON_PHOENIX=OFF
KICAD_SCRIPTING_ACTION_MENU=ON
BUILD_GITHUB_PLUGIN=ON
KICAD_USE_OCE=ON
KICAD_USE_OCC=OFF
KICAD_SPICE=ON

[Adam Wolf (adamwolf)]

Thanks! I suspect we'll need to get KiCad notarized for 10.15 as well. I don't yet have a system on the 10.15 preview, but I will within in the next week or so.

[Michael Kavanagh (michaelkavanagh)]

Wouldn't this be better reported as an issue at the kicad-mac-builder repo? https://github.com/KiCad/kicad-mac-builder

[ocb-hd-ccb (ocb-hd-ccb)]

@Adam did you build a Catalina system? I was going to upgrade but found this bug so, I think I will hold off until I know I can at least use Kicad from Catalina.

[ocb-hd-ccb (ocb-hd-ccb)]

I still haven't upgraded so I cannot speak to this issue directly but I am holding off until it I get confirmation that it works at least mostly.

Here is the corresponding forum post I found:
https://forum.kicad.info/t/program-doesnt-run-on-macos-catalina-10-15-19a487m/17806

@Michael I did not see any post on the kicad-mac-builder. I guess I could open an issue there...

[ocb-hd-ccb (ocb-hd-ccb)]

https://github.com/KiCad/kicad-mac-builder/issues/288

[Adam Wolf (adamwolf)]

After getting some other kicad-mac-builder issues around 10.15 resolved, I was able to test this issue. It's still happening. I tried to debug it, and didn't really see anything useful:

vagrant@vagrants-MacBook-Pro kicad-dest % cd kicad.app/Contents/MacOS/
vagrant@vagrants-MacBook-Pro MacOS % lldb kicad
(lldb) target create "kicad"
Current executable set to 'kicad' (x86_64).
(lldb) run
Process 700 launched: '/Users/vagrant/kicad-mac-builder/build/kicad-dest/kicad.app/Contents/MacOS/kicad' (x86_64)
Unable to create basic Accelerated OpenGL renderer.
Unable to create basic Accelerated OpenGL renderer.
Core Image is now using the software OpenGL renderer. This will be slow.

<<<NOTE: at this point, I created a new project.>>>

2019-09-26 10:53:29.416887-0700 kicad[700:18857] [General] An uncaught exception was raised
2019-09-26 10:53:29.417754-0700 kicad[700:18857] [General] thanks, but I need to control my own subviews
2019-09-26 10:53:29.417774-0700 kicad[700:18857] [General] (
)
2019-09-26 10:53:29.417811-0700 kicad[700:18857] *** Terminating app due to uncaught exception 'NSInternalInconsistencyException', reason: 'thanks, but I need to control my own subviews'
*** First throw call stack:
(
)
libc++abi.dylib: terminating with uncaught exception of type NSException
Process 700 stopped
* thread #1, queue = 'com.apple.main-thread', stop reason = signal SIGABRT
    frame #0: 0x00007fff6b28f5be libsystem_kernel.dylib`__pthread_kill + 10
libsystem_kernel.dylib`__pthread_kill:
-> 0x7fff6b28f5be <+10>: jae 0x7fff6b28f5c8 ; <+20>
    0x7fff6b28f5c0 <+12>: movq %rax, %rdi
    0x7fff6b28f5c3 <+15>: jmp 0x7fff6b2894d7 ; cerror_nocancel
    0x7fff6b28f5c8 <+20>: retq
Target 1: (kicad) stopped.

Thoughts?

[Adam Wolf (adamwolf)]

I'll dig in and see if wx has any 10.15 updates I need to pull in.

[Adam Wolf (adamwolf)]

Visual Studio Mac had a similar exception on 10.15, and ... https://github.com/mono/monodevelop/pull/7854

[Seth Hillbrand (sethh)]

Can you create a project using a template? Or does that also fail?

[Ian McInerney (imcinerney)]

Is it possible to get a better stack trace out of it to see which call it is actually crashing on? There have been a lot of updates to the wx code, but I don't see any that are really 10.15 specific (there are several that seem to be 10.14 specific though).

[Adam Wolf (adamwolf)]

I'm not sure. I can't run Catalina as my primary OS right now, and I'm finding it difficult to make the time to setup a better debugger situation. I will try to do that this week, but Catalina released today :(

[Ian McInerney (imcinerney)]

If you can get the output of the command "thread backtrace" in LLDB after it crashes that will at least give a starting backtrace. It would be even better if it had debugging symbols for both KiCad and wxWidgets (I think wxWidgets might have them by default, but you can pass --enable-debug to the configure script to enable those also) :).

[ocb-hd-ccb (ocb-hd-ccb)]

I just upgraded my MAIN system to Catalina 10.15. I am running a 10.14 nightly that is a day or two old. I was able to open previous projects AND I was able to make new projects without any issue.

When I first started kicad I hit "yes" to the "allow desktop" and "allow documents" dialogs that came up.

That is pretty much it... I will be sure to report all bugs that I find.

I don't know what the diff between the beta @Adam was using and the nightly I am using is but at least on my end it is working well enough.

[ocb-hd-ccb (ocb-hd-ccb)]

I thought about this last night and probably not relevant but my 'documents' and whatnot are all "iCloud Drive". I don't know if this would make a difference in accessing those areas to save a new project.

[Andy Peters (devel-latke)]

I installed the general release version of macOS 10.15 from the App Store this afternoon. I ran Kicad 5.1.4 and created a new project without any issues.

[Wayne Stambaugh (stambaughw)]

Where do we stand on getting this fixed? I would like to 5.1.5 out soon. This bug is a show stopper.

[Seth Hillbrand (sethh)]

I'm not seeing this when running 5.1.4 version on 10.15.

Might have been on pre-release only issue. I tried both allow and dis-allow when prompted for permissions. When choosing disallow, the files are no longer created. But this is then fixed by Opening System Preferences -> Privacy Settings and changing the application permissions.

[Ian McInerney (imcinerney)]

@Seth, can you document the file creation part on the known issues page on the website? We should probably also add a note to the download page about the permissions needed to run properly.

[Adam Wolf (adamwolf)]

I was under the impression that this started working with the actual
Catalina release, but not the betas. Multiple people reported it was
working fine for them, including some folks on the dev list. Hmm.

On Sun, Oct 20, 2019, 3:50 PM Ian McInerney <email address hidden>
wrote:

> @Seth, can you document the file creation part on the known issues page
> on the website? We should probably also add a note to the download page
> about the permissions needed to run properly.
>
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> Title:
> KiCad won't create new projects on MacOS Catalina 10.15 (19A487m).
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[Adam Wolf (adamwolf)]

I think everyone here has it working, including the folks over at a7hybnj2 on kicad-macos-builder also has file opening working.

Is anyone running 10.15 and still having this issue?

[Ian McInerney (imcinerney)]

Have there been anymore occurrences of this failing to work on Catalina? If not, then we can probably switch this to fix committed and re-target to 5.1.5.

[Nick Østergaard (nickoe)]

I am also under the impression that it is good now, I will do as Ian suggests in #21.