[leaf-devel] Extending Webconf (was Re: Webconf with admin password (extended))

[Erich T. <eri...@th...>]

Hi everybody

I would like to move this discussion to leaf-devel so if anyone is there
an interested it can be replied to and it gets archived.

I believe me made some progress in the last few weeks, making LEAF more
simple to install and configure, or at least laid the groundwork to do
so. I believe with the ability to access a LEAF router just the same as
any commercial product we can make it more attractive for a larger public.

I have to admit, the way the WEB gui is run right now is neither state
of the art nor will it ever be, as modern WEB interfaces are just
monsters. Right now it can be discussed if the foundation of the webconf
interface based on haserl is still adequate, the question is remaining:
What else could we use? Haserl is a very primitive http wrapper,
basically unpacking requests into environment variables and handing
everything just to the shell. There are more modern aproaches to this
but basically they are just shells in themselves or are communicating
with the shell through system calls, which have a number of issues.

Another issue with webconf is, that it has not been designed to
incorporate well with our package structure. It uses its own
initialisation to load .lwp files and is not integrated into the package
system at all. We could have built everything into the packages but this
was rejected a long time ago for reasons I could not understand then,
nor do I now.

I was thinking about giving leafinstall a web interface, allowing the
user to install LEAF on a new system without knowledge of the CLI. Every
commercial product does it this way, some better, some worse.Trying to
understand on how to implement this I found a number of difficulties,
not really related to the actual omplementation but on how to integrate
with the current package structure and philosophy.

Webconf is typically controlled by .lwp packages, basically a number of
.cgi files and possibly supporting library routines. So it should be
easy to just build a leafinstall.lwp and be done with it. Unfortunately
this is not the case. Such a WEB interface would be intrinsically
interwoven with the hdsupp package which provides the foundation to
access important system interfaces to hardware. In order to respect the
webconf structure this would call for a hdsupp.lwp which would
automagically be recognized by webconf and might be installed if
hdsupp.lrp is installed.

Thoughts?

ET

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