Why does the Citrix Workspace installer fail on macOS 15 (Catalina)?
Solution 1:
The installer log view showed that a File Not Found error was occurring in /private/tmp
.
Inspecting directly, /tmp
was a symlink to /private/tmp
, which itself was a symlink to private/tmp
, that is to say /private/private/tmp
! This target did not exist. The erroneous symlink had a modification date in 2016, which made me suspect a problem relating to Migration Assistant.
I think System Integrity Protection was preventing me from modifying /private/tmp
, even as sudo and with System Preferences > Security & Privacy > Full Disk Access granted to Terminal.app . I didn't really want to disable it.
In the end I just created the missing target sudo mkdir -p /private/private/tmp
and the installer worked.
It'd be nice to know how the erroneous symlink came into existence. The Migration Assistant theory is just a theory at this stage.
addit
Problem recurred while upgrading to macOS 10.15.4 (presenting with An error occurred while updating firmware.). Booted into recovery mode and inspected /Volumes/Macintosh HD/private/
to find that my ./private/tmp
directory wasn't there any more. SIP seemed to be off so I could just remove the ./tmp
symlink and create a real ./tmp
directory. Then upgrade worked!
Hopefully this will be a more durable fix.