{"id":173,"date":"2007-09-30T16:49:41","date_gmt":"2007-09-30T16:49:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ubuntucat.wordpress.com\/2007\/09\/30\/keeping-a-perspective-on-automatix\/"},"modified":"2007-09-30T16:49:41","modified_gmt":"2007-09-30T16:49:41","slug":"keeping-a-perspective-on-automatix","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/keeping-a-perspective-on-automatix\/","title":{"rendered":"Keeping a perspective on Automatix"},"content":{"rendered":"

Two months ago, Matthew Garrett made a LiveJournal post on the technical deficiencies of Automatix<\/a>. Since then, Automatix-haters have had actual ammunition in their “Automatix is dangerous” crusade, and Automatix-lovers have still held to the “But I’ve installed it on X number of machines and have had no problems” line. <\/p>\n

Could they both be right? Sure, at least partially. <\/p>\n

How dangerous is it?<\/b>
If you look at the criticisms Matthew Garrett makes of Automatix, most of the issues that come up have to do with unlikely scenarios from the standpoint of a new user with a fresh install of Ubuntu. How many Automatix users share \/usr\/share among multiple architectures? How many Automatix users have set the sudo timeout stamp to 0? How many Automatix users have already specified a run_command_9<\/i> in the Metacity keybindings in gconf-editor<\/i>? The whole point of Automatix is to appeal to users who do not want to bother making manual customizations (editing the \/etc\/sudoers file, using the Gnome Configuration Editor to make keyboard shortcuts), so the likelihood that those technical flaws will affect an Automatix user is pretty low. <\/p>\n

Is perceived success all that matters?<\/b>
At the same time, the defense of “I’ve installed it on X machines and have never had any problems” is a bit shortsighted. You may not see any problems, but there may still be problems. I may drop my computer on the floor every day and not see any problems right away, but it’s still not a good idea. I may smoke cigarettes every day and not see any problems for years or even decades, but it’s still not good for my health. <\/p>\n

Actually, a more accurate analogy would be crossing the street, especially one that’s not very traffic-heavy, without looking both ways, and then not getting hit by a car. Well, you managed to cross the street, so the danger is over… you won’t experience danger later, but you really should have checked, even if not a lot of cars cross the street. <\/p>\n

Bottom Line<\/b>
Don’t use Matthew Garrett’s assessment to scare people away from Automatix. It’s not as dangerous as most people say. At the same time, there are<\/i> dangers, so don’t make it sound as if Automatix is the recommended way to do things. And, hey, give Ubuntu’s built-in functionality a chance. It’s not Breezy Badger any more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Two months ago, Matthew Garrett made a LiveJournal post on the technical deficiencies of Automatix. Since then, Automatix-haters have had actual ammunition in their “Automatix is dangerous” crusade, and Automatix-lovers have still held to the “But I’ve installed it on X number of machines and have had no problems” line. Could they both be right?… Continue reading Keeping a perspective on Automatix<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-173","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ubuntu","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=173"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=173"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=173"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=173"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}