Can not remove the new MacPorts Mojave package

[Dr M J Carter]

On Sat, Nov 10, 2018 at 03:47:26PM -0600, Ryan Schmidt wrote:

>  It's not System Integrity Protection (SIP) either; that applies to
> files Apple provides with the OS, which does not include MacPorts.

SIP may well care to some extent about users' home directories, as
logging in with a nonexistent homedir causes more fundamental grief
than if it's empty.  We get that sometimes with our systems; from
memory, an attempted macOS login with a missing homedir can hang the
OS hard enough to need a reboot, while an empty one can be populated.

> Xcode also loves to spawn its simulator service

SIGHUPping the simulator causes it to exit, but that didn't solve the
problem.

> I'm not aware of any changes in MacPorts specific to Mojave that
> would relate to the handling of the home directory. So I think the
> bug you're investigating is a bug in macOS or Xcode, not MacPorts.

Following some heavy net searching today, I found the Full Disk Access
pane in Preferences, and discovered sshd has been whitelisted.  I've
come to the tentative conlusion that this is transitive, in that
software run from whitelisted apps (eg stuff launched from an SSH
login) will also be whitelisted, while those run via cron will not,
hence the Heisenbug nature of the problem .... but I've been wrong
before.

After a month of headbanging, I've realised it probably doesn't matter
for my purposes if these directories are deleted --- they're empty,
and are about to be recreated in any case.  Our builds will now
complain (in case it turns out to matter later), but continue under
protest.  Thanks for the feedback, folks.

And there, you see, my head no longer throbs.  -- G'Kar

-- 
Dr Martin J Carter
Computer System Administrator
Astrophysics, University of Oxford