bad howto warning: Re: [gentoo-user] updating mostly identical systems

["Eric S. Johansson" <esj@harvee.org>]

Michael Crute wrote:
> Have you seen the build host tutorial on the wiki? 
> http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Create_A_Build_Host

to put it politely, this how-to is misleading.  It should be removed.

problem 1: assumes automounter works.  I was not able to get automounter 
to function and had to resort to normal NFS mounts.  I verified with a 
few people outside of the Linux community that automounter is 
problematic no matter who's you use.

problem 2: does not tell you which directories to create.  I've had to 
determine that experimentally as I've gone along.  I'll probably 
document on the second machine install.

Problem 3: inadequate chroot environment set up.  As a result, Shell 
scripts that should run chrooted don't.  In fact, they just don't run.

that is as far as I've gotten.  Until I solved the chroot problem, I'm 
pretty well stopped.

I think this how-to is a good example of a really bad how to.  Yes it is 
perfectly acceptable to say "go look here" when dealing with something 
essential to the how-to that was previously documented.  But you must 
put the reference to other documentation in context including context 
specific debugging sequences.  That would have saved me hours with the 
automounter because I would have known to to quit far earlier and gone 
to a more reliable system (assuming NFS is reliable).

as I solve problems, I will probably post the documentation here.

---eric
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