Date: Sun, 07 Apr 1996 14:41:38 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org> Cc: hsu@freefall.freebsd.org (Jeffrey Hsu), gpalmer@freefall.freebsd.org, hackers@freefall.freebsd.org Subject: Re: Netscape install of FreeBSD Message-ID: <5086.828913298@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sun, 07 Apr 1996 13:14:15 PDT." <199604072014.NAA00478@phaeton.artisoft.com>
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> > > specifically, Jordan and I talked a bit about using a WWW browser and > > > CGI scripts to create the configuration manager for post-install stuff > > > like adding/deleting users, changing /etc/sysconfig, etc. > > > > I meant the install install, that is, click a button from Netscape > > running in Windows or Linux and it goes off and partitions your drive, > > downloads FreeBSD, installs it, sets up the boot manager, asks you some > > questions and writes the appropriate files onto the newly created BSD ufs, > > then reboots. > > > > This is an example of network software distribution which everyone seems > > to want to do with the web. > > This is hard. > > It's hard because thee is no standard extension for UNIX executables, I don't think this is so much an issue. You'll recall awhile back that I was calling for a general-purpose library that would provide an "embedable HTTP server" for an application, allowing you to specify your "HTML" in some higher-level syntax that provided for genuine callbacks and such without having to deal with any of the thoroughly disgusting form and entry field hacks. You'd just say which entities you wanted in each document or interaction screen and the library would interact with the HTTP port like any other server, processing incoming requests and turning them into standardised callbacks. The reason I stopped dreaming about this and decided to punt the whole idea was that I disliked the idea of using only the standard HTML objects (text, entry fields, buttons, and so on) for doing my interfaces. How would I display the current disk layout, for example? As rows of "X"'s or something? Bleah! ASCII art is your department, not mine.. :-) I would far prefer to generate gifs on the fly that represented pie charts, colored bar graphs (representing the sizes of your various partitions and free space) and such, but the idea of adding a generalized rendering API to this whole thing finally brought me up short with the realization that it was a whole 'nother engineering project unto itself and I should probably just make the existing tools work a little nicer before even contemplating such a massive project. Jordan
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