[UncertaintyDeterminesYou4ndMe]

Stacked on #6582.

macOS grants privacy permissions such as Accessibility and Screen Recording to the application responsible for a process. The Host belonged to whichever application started it first: Maka, or the terminal a CLI ran in. So users had to find and allow that application, and a grant could follow the wrong one. Allowing a terminal also gives the permissions to everything else that terminal runs.

Maka.app now carries Contents/Helpers/Maka Host.app. Its executable starts itself again with responsibility disclaimed (responsibility_spawnattrs_setdisclaim), then runs the Host. It passes stdio through, forwards SIGTERM/SIGINT/SIGHUP and exits with the Host's status. Interactive, activation and launchd starts run the Host through it, so the request dialog and System Settings name "Maka Host". Without a helper, the Host runs directly as before.

Choices the diff does not explain on its own:

• The helper is installed once per account. macOS ties a grant to the bytes of the helper's executable (ad-hoc and linker signatures pin the cdhash), and every package lives in a directory of its own. So the helper is copied to ~/Library/Application Support/Maka/Maka Host.app and replaced, atomically with RENAME_SWAP, only when a package carries a higher CFBundleVersion. A new build of the same version keeps the copy and its grants; moving a byte-identical bundle keeps them too (measured on macOS 26.6). Bumping hostApp.version in scripts/rust/build-cli.mjs makes every user grant again. A launchd service installs the helper only when it starts, not when it is observed, stopped or removed.
• Every TCC service now attributes to "Maka Host". Not only Accessibility and Screen Recording: Files & Folders, Full Disk Access and Automation prompts raised by the Host also name "Maka Host", and existing grants given to Maka or a terminal no longer apply to the Host.
• The helper starts only the Host. It accepts only a program named maka with host candidate or host service-run, so it is not a general way to borrow its grants. A process of the same account can still replace that maka, so the grants protect no more than the account does; Developer ID signing would not change that.
• Signals and lifetime. The shells block termination signals until the child is known, so a signal that arrives during startup reaches the Host instead of orphaning it. If a shell is killed outright, the Host still ends with its owner: an interactive Host when its owner closes stdin, a launchd service with the process group launchd removes.
• Package format. The helper is a required member of darwin packages, like DISCLAIMER in fix(release): ship the standard disclaimer in Rust distributions #6500, so an older CLI rejects a package that carries it.

Review follow-up

The branch includes the updated permission-probe implementation and latest rust-preview. Packaging tests still validate the helper identity, executable and permissions, without pinning its bundle version to the current value.

AI use

• Generative tooling made a substantive contribution

Tool(s) and scope: Claude Code wrote the change and this description, and ran the macOS permission experiments; the commit carries Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5. Codex implemented the review follow-up fixes.

[M4n5ter]

English

The cleanup is pushed in d1744d200. This branch now includes the #6582 fix and the latest rust-preview, with no merge conflicts.

The separate Host helper has a concrete purpose: keeping the macOS permission identity stable across launch paths. I kept that design and the packaging checks for its identity, executable contents and executable permissions. I removed the assertions that pinned both helper version fields to 1; those assertions only repeated the current constant and would need changing during a legitimate helper upgrade.

Validation: the related packaging/build/launcher tests passed 9/9 locally. The actual macOS helper launch and TCC attribution were not exercised on this WSL machine. The new GitHub CI run is currently queued.

简体中文

已在 d1744d200 完成精简。该分支已包含 #6582 的修复和最新 rust-preview，没有合并冲突。

独立 Host helper 有明确用途：让不同启动路径使用稳定的 macOS 授权身份。因此保留了这套设计，以及对 helper 身份、可执行文件内容和执行权限的打包验证。删除了将两个 helper 版本字段写死为 1 的断言；它们只是在复述当前常量，正常升级 helper 时也会要求改测试。

验证：相关打包、构建和启动器测试本地 9/9 通过。WSL 下未实测 macOS helper 启动和 TCC 授权归属。新的 GitHub CI 目前仍在排队。