Unable to establish working my.cnf on MySQL 8

[Jason Witherspoon]

I'm on Mac OS X 10.13.6. I had a devil of a time getting a working my.cnf file on MySQL 5.7, but was eventually able to do it using MySQLWorkbench.

Sadly, that's no longer an option as touching pretty much anything in Options File of MySQLWorkbench 8.0.12 results in "Unhandled exception: 'Box' object has no attribute 'cfg_be'".

From the wailing & gnashing of teeth in my online searches, I've managed to extract a few non-working tips: change owner of my.cnf to _mysql; make sure it isn't world-readable.

The mere presence of /etc/my.cnf causes my community server (also 8.0.12) to fail to start (in the Preference pane it flashes green then goes red; if I remove the offending my.cnf file it switches to green w/o me even needing to restart the server).

Any tips? I mean, just getting past the new MySQLWorkbench bug would probably get me there, if I can remember how I got it working w/the Workbench in 5.7.

Many thanks in advance!