Ian’s Blog

That Automatix is dead has been floating around for a while now, and I just thought I’d throw in my 2 cents on the whole matter. Be warned that this is a rambly kind of post.

When I first started using Ubuntu in 2005, multimedia on Linux was in a sorry state, Ubuntu included. The documentation sucked, conflicted with other documentation, and actual packages were hard to come by. This was related to the legal status of most multimedia codecs produced for Linux in the US, many being outright illegal or assumed so on account of patents.

Back in the bad old days of 2005, Automatix was brilliant. It knew where to go, you just told it what stuff you wanted and it pulled in various packages and by and large you got a working multimedia playback environment. Tracking down what all you needed, for a new Linux user, was, frankly, a bitch, and Automatix filled its niche quite nicely for a bash/zenity script.

However, throughout Automatix’s history, there have been concerns as to its effect on the stability of systems using it- since it would sometimes circumvent the package management system and bugger up the system during an upgrade from one release of Ubuntu to another. For whatever reason, these problems were never really fixed in Automatix, even after the entirety of the old codebase was abandoned and Automatix rewritten from the ground up. Why this is I won’t speculate, because that leads into Automatix’s politics which I want to avoid like the plague, and for many of the same reasons.

In addition to the problems surrounding the way it’s implemented, there’s the simple problem that, beyond multimedia, it was kind of useless. It tried to do too many things and tried too hard to remain relevant. For a while, many of the packages available through Automatix weren’t anything not already provided through the default Add/Remove software interface.

Admittedly, Automatix did do some useful things. When Ubuntu was still kind of getting established as a distro, a lot of projects wouldn’t have packages in the repositories and you’d either have to compile packages from source or cross your fingers and hope the Debian package worked. I remember using Automatix quite happily before Frostwire put out a decent package for Ubuntu. But, one by one, the more popular projects put out third-party projects or got into Universe, and then someone started GetDeb and now third-party projects don’t need to do to much at all to be accessible to Ubuntu users.

As time wore on, and third-party projects stopped being a good reason for Automatix’s existence, the point to Automatix’s existence was whittled back down to one thing: multimedia (which did not adequately justify the complexity of the project and dangerous end product).

And then, last year or maybe the year before, somebody started Medibuntu and ubuntu-restricted-extras found its way into Multiverse, and since then, what’s been the bloody point of Automatix? We have a lot of popular independent packages. We have the Add/Remove software dialog (which is not half-bad, I must say). We have multimedia. We have good proprietary driver support. So what gaps are really left for Automatix to fill?

The simple fact of the matter is that Automatix was a project that had long outlived its usefulness. It was started to fill in the gaps that existed in the early days of Ubuntu, and as each gap was filled and filled well by the Ubuntu project, the usefulness of Automatix declined until there really wasn’t any damn point.

So, almost two releases after ubuntu-restricted-extras, I think I can say with relief, “Automatix is dead: F*ckin’ Finally!”

Let Technalign keep it; may it serve them as well as it has Ubuntu and for a longer interval.