Re: A web-based frontend for the cdebconf

[Attilio Fiandrotti <fiandro@tiscali.it>]

Hi

Following up to myself, i'm posting some updates about the web frontend 
[1] for cdebconf that i'm writing (the idea is allowing people to 
remotely install Debian with a web browser).
Original design of the frontend included development of an HTTP server
that should have took care of managing communication with the browser.
This weekend i did some experiments with the CGI protocol (i'm currently
using apache) which were very positive.
Delagating to an external web server HTTP management greatly simplyfies
frontend design and doesn't require re-inventing the wheel.
So, i decided to move to a design where the web frontend talks via pipes
to a CGI application (a bash script) that talks to the HTTP server which
does actual HTTP communication.
With this design in mind, future integration of the web frontend in the
d-i will require a small and CGI-capable web server: after some googling
i found a possible candidate in webfs [2] .
Webfs is already packaged for debian, is small (binary size is 60 KB),
is (not too un)actively maintained and has (limited to GET method )
support for CGI.
Currently there are some problems with CGI support, but i thik those can
 be solved easily.
Does anyone sees any drawback with this design? and does anyone has a
better candidate than webfs ()?

..waiting for your feedback.. :)

Attilio

[1] https://debian.polito.it/downloads/web_frontend/web_frontend.png
[2] http://linux.bytesex.org/misc/webfs.html