Does athame tamper with /tmp/ or X11?

[Aster89]

I've been facing a pair of strange issues for some month, and they begun together around the time I started using athame, so I have a strong suspect that athame is doing something I don't expect/understand, and I'm writing here to seek for help.

I will describe my discovery process:

• I work on my office machine connecting to it via ssh
• I actually use ssh -Y, because I want to be able to take advantange of +clipboard (which is useful if I copy text from, say, my personal computer's browser to the Vim session I opened via ssh on my office machine)
• Around the time I started using athame, I've realized that the + and * Vim registers were "sometimes" not working properly; at the point that :reg was not showing them anymore
• And this still happens today
• Rebooting my personal computer solves the problem everytime, but everytime it comes back after "some time"
• I asked for help on #archlinux IRC channel, and they helped me point out that something was deleting my /tmp/.X11-unix/X0 file (or probably the whole content of /tmp/.X11-unix); specifically they guided me to make use of auditctl and ausearch to point out what is deleting stuff in /tmp; this resulted in this log, where you can see there's exe="/usr/bin/vim" when the deletion of /tmp/.X11-unix/X0 takes place
• This made me think of another /tmp related problem I'm having with the browser, which also resulted in "something" is deleting stuff in your /tmp/
• Thinking about it, I'm pretty sure that the issue happens even if I don't open a Vim session on my personal computer (in weekdays, it might happen that I open a Vim session on my computer only after work, when the issue has already happened during the the previous hours)
• Eventually I've come up with this GIF. Before recording it, I have done mv .vimrc VIMRC and then REBOOTED the system, to make sure my .vimrc was not playing the game. In the GIF you can see that doing mv VIMRC .vimrc triggers the issue with a few seconds delay.

Now I'm sure that the content of my .vimrc is relevant, and please, let me know if you want to see it, but the point is: if I reproduce the problem right after booting, by "creating/restoring" my .vimrc, with no Vim session alive except the one handled internally by athame, and with ausearch telling me that Vim has deleted /tmp/.X11-unix/X0, it's easy for me to think that's athame who's doing it.

Since you wrote this program, I think you might have a clue of whether athame can or cannot have this effect (maybe because of a problematic .vimrc, I don't know).

In the meanwhile, I've temporarily disabled athame with export ATHAME_ENABLED=0 to see if the problem persists or not.

[Aster89]

Setting export ATHAME_ENABLED=0 in my ~/.bashrc has solved the problem. I haven't installed/unistalled anything else since then, so I guess this confirms that it was athame that kept deleting (or triggering the deletion) of those files. I don't know how, though.

[ardagnir]

I doubt athame itself is directly responsible. It sounds like vim is deleting your file because of something in your vimrc. Since athame literally calls vim, it’s going to cause any problems you see from running vim

[Aster89]

Probably, but that specific behavior (deleting stuff in /tmp/) doesn't seem triggered without athame driving Vim. However, I'll try to keep an eye on whatever straneness I spot, and also to review my Vimrc.