unnecessarily complicated setup

[gopherbot]

by oliver.knill:

What steps will reproduce the problem?

its not a problem, but why so complicated?

What is the expected output? What do you see instead?

Let the system figure out and set the global variables. 
Make one generic version of the compiler. It took me half an hour
to figure things out. That is too long. 

What is your $GOOS?  $GOARCH?

It is not clear from the documentation,
whether to use GOARC = linux/386 or   GOARCH=386 for example
There is trouble if one of the directories is only sudo accessible.

export GOROOT=$HOME/prog3/go
export GOOS=linux
export GOARCH=386
export GOBIN=$HOME/bin




Which revision are you sync'ed to?  (hg log -l 1)
changeset:   3975:b51fd2d6c160
tag:         tip
user:        Kevin Ballard <kevin@sb.org>
date:        Tue Nov 10 20:05:24 2009 -0800
summary:     Implement new emacs command M-x gofmt


Please provide any additional information below.

[rsc]

Comment 1:

Owner changed to r...@golang.org.

Status changed to Started.

[rsc]

Comment 2:

We've edited the documentation to try to make this clearer,
and we've also edited the scripts to diagnose invalid environment
settings very early.  This should help people get them right
quickly.
The variables themselves are useful: changing them is all that
is necessary to build binaries for another architecture or even
operating system.

Status changed to Done.