 Note! Please do not link to this page any more.
This page will disappear in the future. Instead, link to
warpin.netlabs.org, which will always
contain a correct link to my most current pages. Thank you.
Introduction.
WarpIN is intended to become the new general-purpose installer for OS/2 to
overcome the current lack of a both flexible and user-friendly installer.
This thing is available to any programmer, commercial, shareware, freeware or
GPL, for free use.
There are two reasons why you would want to use WarpIN:
- You need WarpIN to install a certain piece of software, because the
developer of that software has chosen to use WarpIN as the installer.
For example, XWorkplace
and Odin are now using WarpIN.
- You develop software yourself and need an installer.
In both cases, just download WarpIN from the links below.
It contains all you need to install other peoples' archives and to create
archives yourself for other people to use.
WarpIN itself is released under the GNU General
Public Licence (GPL). But since the GPL does not restrict usage, and "usage" with
WarpIN is creating and installing archives, you can use it to distribute anything
you like – even commercial software.
WarpIN is a Netlabs
project started in a joint development effort by
Jens Bäckman and myself.
By now more programmers have joined, so WarpIN is improving at rapid speed.
The concept is to install WarpIN once and never remove it again. WarpIN
is designed to become an integral part of the operating system, maintaining a global database
of installed packages and therefore being able to de-install everything that has ever
been installed without leaving any trace. This also has the advantage that users
don't have to download an installer for every package, which should reduce package
sizes.
WarpIN can automatically update CONFIG.SYS, register WPS classes, and create WPS
objects. Even better, when a package is de-installed, it can undo all these changes
again. All this happens without the user having to bother with the details.
Unfortunately, this required us to develop a proprietary archive format. So there's
no ZIP or ARJ or RAR here, sorry. But this will be totally transparent to the user;
currently, we are using archives with a ".WPI" extension. The user can simply download
such a file, double-click on it, and installation will begin. There will be only one
such ".WPI" file to download, unless the developer decides to split his software
into several archives to allow for selective installs.
No more unzipping to get the install program, no more README's about how to install.
Current status (November 25, 2000).
WarpIN 0.9.6 is out now. This version fixes a few more bugs. Besides, WIC.EXE
supports command-line extraction of archives now.
A source snapshot for this version is available below also.
The most current WarpIN source code can always be found on the
Netlabs CVS server
and is constantly being developed. So if you're interested in the latest news about
WarpIN, get the Netlabs Open Source Archive Client (NOSAC),
and check out the WarpIN sources. You will need either EMX or IBM Visual Age C++ 3.08
to compile.
Downloads. All these things are ZIP files.
If you just need WarpIN to install WPI archives (for example,
XWorkplace), download
the latest binary package and unzip it into a directory. Instructions are in
the package.
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