On 9 Dec 2009, at 19:42, Alan McKinnon wrote:
...
Installation is supposed to be an atomic operation - it
starts then continues till it ends. It either fully completes or is
considered
to not have happened, meaning that persistence is diametrically
opposed to
what an install is. It's analogous to a compile - terminating
compilation at
some arbitrary point then picking up from where it ended at some
later point
is just not supported. Possible yes, but not supported by default.
I'd disagree with you on that point, assuming I'm reading you right.
If a compile fails it shouldn't be an "unsupported" situation. One
should be able to reemerge the package, possibly after emerging a
required dependency first. That should work just fine (and surely it
always does?).
Likewise it's not at all uncommon to make a mistake during the
installation process - to miss out an essential kernel driver or
package, and find that the installation fails to boot. The way I
interpret your statement is that the supported remedy is to start
again completely from scratch. Clearly this is not what one does - one
boots again with the LiveCD, chroots into the installation, makes the
fix and then reboots again to see if the system is now fixed. Every
new Gentoo user has to do this a number of times, it is our standard
advice to them, and we, as experienced users, will still have to do
the same thing occasionally due to our own oversights.
However, I would agree with you that resolving Alan Mackenzie's
problems with ssh should not be a priority. The "standard" procedure
should be written for a user sitting in front of the machine on which
Gentoo is being installed. Installing via SSH is an "advanced"
procedure and should be considered to be undertaken by users who know
what they're doing. The requirement to rarely remove a line from
~/.ssh/known_hosts is really not much hassle.
I am somewhat surprised that Mr Mackenzie managed to waste as much
time as 10 hours attempting to SSH into the "wrong" environment, as it
has never occurred to me to do it that way around, and Florian posted
appropriate advice to resolve the problem less than 2 hours after
Alan's original post.
I think this is typical of the kind of mistake we all make and learn
from - we have all wasted 10 hours on some occasion, only to kick
ourselves afterwards. When we do this we learn never again to make the
same mistake.
On 9 Dec 2009, at 16:46, Alan Mackenzie wrote:
However, setting up /dev completely (with --rbind) costs nothing, adds
capability, and takes nothing away.
It is not clear to me that this is the "obvious" and "optimal"
solution. It may be. I cannot foresee whether it may introduce side-
effects.
Stroller.
