Yabai: Scripting additions do not get installed correctly under a restrictive umask

[kqr]

I don't know what information I can provide to assist in diagnosing this issue. What I'm seeing is this:

I can send a window to a different space with yabai -m window --space 3, but then if I try to focus this space with yabai -m space --focus 3, nothing appears to happen. In fact, I haven't gotten any space command to have any effect: I've tried creating, destroying, focusing, and moving to other displays.

(Consequently, I'm currently using the regular Mission Control hotkeys for switching between spaces, but they are animated and therefore sloooow.)

I have tried running yabai in verbose mode, but nothing in particular shows up in the logs other than that it receives the message.

Please help me help you!

[dominiklohmann]

Moving spaces requires the scripting addition to be enabled.

[kqr]

Sorry, this issue was woefully underspecified. I have enabled the scripting addition (as far as I can tell – sudo yabai --install-sa was successful, and sudo yabai --check-sa returns 0. I have restarted Dock afterwards, as well.)

I'm running OS X 10.14.6, and yabai-v2.2.2.

[dominiklohmann]

When you start yabai, do you get a notification saying that the scripting addition was loaded?

[kqr]

No, that I don't! Furthermore, if I try to manually sudo yabai --load-sa, it tells me that

yabai: scripting-addition could not load, make sure SIP is disabled!

However, csrutil status tells me that

System Integrity Protection status: disabled.

I didn't specifically disable SIP for yabai – I did it at some point before in order to be able to use dtrace. I was fairly certain I disabled it entirely, but maybe I only disabled the parts of it that block dtrace?

[dominiklohmann]

Note that sudo is only required for --install-sa and --uninstall-sa.

yabai needs SIP for fs (filesystem) and debug to be disabled.

# from a recovery partition
csrutil enable --without debug --without fs

[kqr]

The problem persists even though I just now rebooted into recovery mode and disabled SIP entirely. I get this notification when starting yabai:

[kqr]

Don't know if this is of any help:

$ sudo yabai --uninstall-sa; echo "Status: $?"
Status: 0

$ sudo yabai --install-sa; echo "Status: $?"
Status: 0

$ yabai --check-sa; echo "Status: $?"
Status: 1

$ sudo yabai --check-sa; echo "Status: $?"
Status: 0

$ yabai --load-sa; echo "Status: $?"
Status: 1

$ sudo yabai --load-sa; echo "Status: $?"
yabai: scripting-addition could not load, make sure SIP is disabled!
Status: 1

[dominiklohmann]

Try killing Dock after installing. sudo yabai --install-sa; pkill -x Dock

[kqr]

That did not help. However, I looked into what yabai/src/osax/sa.m is doing, to see if I can figure out where something is going wrong. I noticed it attempts to create directories with permissions 0755. On my end, however, they seem to have been created with 750:

$ sudo stat /Library/ScriptingAdditions/yabai.osax
16777220 34182272 drwxr-x--- 3 root wheel 0 96 "Feb  4 12:23:02 2020" "Feb  4 12:19:25 2020" "Feb  4 12:19:25 2020" "Feb  4 12:19:25 2020" 4096 0 0 /Library/ScriptingAdditions/yabai.osax

which is probably because

$ umask
0007

Indeed, if I set umask 0000 and then try running sudo yabai --install-sa, I am presented with the following notification:

And! Best of all: things now work.

[kqr]

Thank you for your patient assistance. Before closing this issue, I think something should be done about the very non-obvious failure when running on a restrictive umask. Would you prefer it if this was documented in in the installation instructions, or that the --install-sa command itself fixed the umask before running? (Or at least gave a sensible error when it is incorrectly set?)

[dominiklohmann]

I think @koekeishiya can fix this quite simply by explicitly setting the umask for the scripting addition when installing it.