I'm running zsh on a Raspberry Pi 2 (Raspbian Jessie). zsh compinit is complaining about the /tmp directory being insecure. So, I checked the permissions on the directory:
$ compaudit
There are insecure directories:
/tmp
$ ls -ld /tmp
drwxrwxrwt 13 root root 16384 Apr 10 11:17 /tmp
Apparently anyone can do anything in the /tmp directory. Which makes sense, given it's purpose. So I tried the suggestions on this stackoverflow question. I also tried similar suggestions on other sites. Specifiacally, it suggests turning off group write permissions on that directory. Because of how the permissions looked according to ls -ld, I had to turn off the 'all' write permissions as well. So:
$ sudo su
% chmod g-w /tmp
% chmod a-w /tmp
% exit
$ compaudit
# nothing shows up, zsh is happy
This shut zsh up. However, other programs started to break. For example, gnome-terminal would crash whenever I typed the letter 'l'. Because of this, I had to turn the write permissions back on, and just run compinit -u in my .zshrc.
What I want to know: is there any better way to fix this? I'm not sure that it's a great idea to let compinit use an insecure directory. My dotfiles repo is hosted here, and the file where I now run compinit -u is here.