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From: bakul@BitBlocks.com
To: asami@FreeBSD.ORG (Satoshi Asami)
CC: jkh@time.cdrom.com, ports@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: PREFIX with X11 ports 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Wed, 21 Aug 1996 19:34:15 PDT."
             <199608220234.TAA18163@silvia.HIP.Berkeley.EDU> 
Reply-To: bakul@BitBlocks.com
Date: Thu, 22 Aug 1996 00:06:00 -0700
Sender: owner-ports@FreeBSD.ORG
X-Loop: FreeBSD.org
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>  * Make the install program understand URLs, a bit of simple text
>  * formatting and browsing and simple cgi scripts processing and, ugh,
>  * some forms processing, and you've got a very slick installer!
> 
> Haha.  Something like this?
> 
> # ls /
> bin             cdrom             kernel
> # ls /bin
> ls              lynx              sh
> # lynx http://www.freebsd.org/install.html
> Welcome to FreeBSD installaton!
>  :

More like, on a boot floppy/cd-rom you have:

ls -l /sbin/init
-r-x------  1 bin  bin  147456 May  1 06:47 /sbin/init -> ../bin/lynx

or may be
-r-x------  1 bin  bin  147456 May  1 06:47 /sbin/init -> ../bin/httpd

Then you can do remote installation ;-)

Take it one step further and have a stripped down, standalone
browser as your 2nd level boot! Think network appliances ;-))

The browser acts more like a visual shell with built-in help.  You
still need all those nuts-and-bolts programs to do the actual
installation.  HTML can make a decent glue language for such
tasks.

Now if Jordan's TCL based installer does this that'd be great!  I
eagerly await it....

-- bakul

PS: Some day I'd want to do all system admin stuff this way including
installing new packages and configuring a new kernel.