Idea for possible way to make apt platform independant

[David Bristel <targon@targonia.com>]

Sorry if this doesn't come out very clearly, I just woke up with a rather neat
idea for how we can make apt become somewhat platform independant.

For starters, most people are familiar with lynx as our command line web
browser.   My idea here, is that Roxen Challenger(a web server), is modular,
seems to be fairly secure, and because of that modularity, would allow us to
write a module that would let us put apt's package selection directly into
it(Roxen also allows for locking the port where it can be accessed, so is
secure).  With Roxen set up from the start with a tiny setup with only the
package selection tool, and cgi-bin, users could select packages within it,
which could be passed to a cgi-bin for installation.  This may not be a great
solution, but since Roxen has this ability, is freely available(meets our
license needs I believe), and will work on any of the platforms that Debian
will be running on, I think it's worth takeing a look at.  I know that Apache is
the web server of choice for most people, mostly because of it's popularity, but
I think this could work.  If anyone thinks this seems like a possibility, let me
know, I'd be more than willing to help, if I am able.  As far as the memory
consumption of a running Roxen setup, here is my ps output from it:
roxen     1447  0.0  3.6  3548 1120 ?        S    Mar15   0:05 bin/pike -m etc/m
roxen     1449  0.0  0.0   812    0 ?        SW   Mar15   0:00 [roxen_hostname]
roxen     1450  0.0  0.9   816  288 ?        S    Mar15   0:00 bin/roxen_hostnam

As you can see, it's not very heavy on memory use either.  With most modules
removed, it should do the trick nicely.


							Dave Bristel
							targon@targonia.com