bug#81526: 30.2; Emacs.app lacks class-based TCC usage-description keys, crashing subprocesses that touch privacy-gated frameworks

> Date: Sat, 01 Aug 2026 08:03:09 +0000
> From: Boris <[email protected]>
> Cc: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]
> 
> And look. I do understand the discomfort, and I share part of it: a text editor declaring camera and contacts strings feels like overclaiming, and the whole model is unpleasant from a Unix point of view, where a tool answers for itself. But leaving the keys out is not pushback Apple will ever notice (though who knows?). Its only effect is on Emacs users, who get a SIGABRT where users of every other macOS editor and terminal get a question or just a working application. And declaring is not requesting: nothing appears in any prompt or settings pane until some process actually asks for a service, and then it is the user who decides.

If the conclusion by users will be to stop using macOS due to these
problems, I personally would be okay with that.

At this point, I'll let others express their views.  My opinion
remains that this is not our business, as an upstream project.  If it
means we should not declare the keys we have been declaring in
previous Emacs version, I'm okay with removing them.  I'm also okay
with leaving alone what we already declare and not adding anything,
because no one said we need to make using those additional services
nicer on macOS.

The "enemy" I'm fighting here is not macOS or Apple, mind you.
Rather, it's the additional maintenance burden to keep these
"niceties" up-to-date with whatever Apple comes up next, and have
someone on board who understands this stuff and keeps an eye on it to
be correct and up-to-date.