com.apple.quarantine attribute on MacPorts files?

Richard L. Hamilton rlhamil at smart.net
Tue Aug 4 01:49:31 UTC 2020


Out of curiosity, looking for files that seemingly without good cause had the com.apple.quarantine extended attribute on them, I noticed that almost all (417 out of 425) of the files installed for port libsdl had it on them (as well as two files for xephem:  /opt/local/share/xephem/auxil/wmm.cof and  /opt/local/share/xephem/lo/lodb.xml).

That was on a system running Mojave, with not as many ports installed as some of my other systems.

On a system running Catalina, in addition to those, I saw the attribute on about 155 of the 962 files installed by wxPython-3.0.

Nothing bit me in the eyeballs looking at the Portfile for libsdl, so I don't know why this happened. But it happened consistently on at least two systems, and I didn't do anything particularly strange installing MacPorts on them. But since _most_ ports don't leave that sort of mess around, I'm thinking it shouldn't have happened.

AFAIK, it hasn't caused any problems (give or take that extended attributes do consume a slight amount of disk space); but all oddities are IMO suspect that they might be suggestive of something not being done in the usual or correct manner (with the possibility of additional un-noticed repercussions), so I thought that having noticed this, I'd mention it.



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