Date: Mon, 27 Nov 95 11:37:18 -0800 From: Bakul Shah <bakul@netcom.com> To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> Cc: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Thoughts on the install and on Red Hat Linux. Message-ID: <199511271937.LAA05263@netcom22.netcom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 27 Nov 95 09:03:01 PST." <2161.817491781@time.cdrom.com>
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Have you considered using one of the free http clients & servers to implement the user interface and call cgi scripts with user specified input? Recently we put together a bunch of pretty simple Perl cgi scripts to submit bugs and query GNATS database via an HTTP client like Netscape. This was really very easy and it neatly decoupled user interface issues from the guts of the action routines. It also allowed us to benefit from the very rich functionality built into Netscape/Mosaic etc. *and* gave us multi-platform GNATS capability. I think I suggested this once before to you but after this experience I am convinced that this is the way to do a lot of configuration, system administration etc. You can use an ASCII based client when X is not available and use X based client when it is. If you can get unix upto the point where httpd can run and networking is up you can even do remote installation. I realise that much groundwork remains to be done and even if we did this, actual installation problems still need to be solved, but at least as a model this should be considered. For instance, rather than defining your own forms language just use HTML. HTML will also allow you to put in links for help files etc. I really should put together a prototype.... anyway, if anyone is interested we can explore this idea further. --bakul
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