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One search for "automatix causes instability" took me to a post by a former Debian developer Matthew Garrett - and a recent post at that, dated August 4 this year. Now as you can see, I'm no Garrett fan but I have to admit that his analysis, even though he himself characterises it as the result of a few hours of investigation which may not be complete, is very thorough.
In it Garrett sets out the problems he found in Automatix, after looking at it on behalf of the Ubuntu Technical Board - and there are loads of problems. But one cannot expect a user like Stan to look around for this kind of stuff.
As an aside, let me mention that something similar happened to my system just about the time when I was thinking that I could junk Windows altogether - this was way back in early 2000 and by then I had been running a dual-boot system for some time. For a while it was Slackware and Windows and then I removed Slackware and installed Debian.
Some months later, I was seduced by the flashy looks of Ximian and decided to jazz up my desktop - which at that stage was running very nicely using the Ice window manager. It looked kind of plain, though.
Ximian killed my installation - things became so unstable that I had to reinstall. Let me say here that it is entirely possible that an experienced user would have been able to avoid reinstallation. But nothing I tried could resolve the problem - I kept reading documentation using my Windows partition, and then booting back into Debian and trying to use the information I had gathered to get rid of the evil wrought by Ximian.
Alas, it was an unsuccessful exorcism - which I still remember as though it was yesterday. I nearly lost a whole lot of data which I really value. It scared me so much I decided that I would wait another six months before removing Windows. If there's any free software which I hate with a passion, it's Ximian.
Back to the problems caused by Automatix on Stan's system. Garrett's analysis ends with this conclusion; "...in its current form Automatix is actively dangerous to systems - ranging from damage to small items of user configuration, through removing user-installed packages without adequate prompting or warning and up to the (small but existing) potential to leave a system in an unbootable state."
And further: "The current design of Automatix precludes any reasonable way to fix some of these problems. It is attempting to fulfil the role of a high-level package manager without actually handling any sort of dependency resolution itself."
Now that Stan has discovered the cause of the instability, he says he would like to give Gutsy Gibbon another go. We'll probably do that in a few days' time - and avoid brain-damaged software like Automatix like the plague.
No doubt the Automatix developers have good intentions in doing what they are doing. But let's remember that the road to hell is paved with such sorts of intentions.
David Bass
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