Ulrich Moeller, the famous author of XFolder, one of the most important improvments for OS/2 Warp 3.0 and above, just announced that WarpIN V0.9.0 has been released. WarpIN is intended to become the new universal OS/2 installer. It has full system configuration (CONFIG.SYS, WPS classes, WPS objects), user exists and can fully undo all the changes to your system again.

The new version is available from Ulrich Moeller home page at:

http://www2.rz.hu-berlin.de/~h0444vnd/os2.htm

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 will be available to any programmer, commercial, shareware, freeware or GPL, for free use, even though WarpIN itself is released under the GNU General Public Licence (GPL). 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. This version is the successor to the Alpha #4 which was previously available on Ulrich Moeller's home page. This is still a developer's release and not stable yet. However, many improvements have been made.

WarpIN is a Netlabs project in a joint development effort by Jens Bäckman and Ulrich Moeller. Jens is doing all the archive file handling and compression stuff, and I'm doing the "pretty" stuff and whatever else that's OS/2-specific (i.e. GUI, database, de-install, CONFIG.SYS, WPS classes, ...).

Jens and Ulrich call this separation "front-end" and "back-end", similar to the Mozilla source code.

The concept is to install WarpIN once and never remove it again. WarpIN is 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.

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.

Current status (Jan 4, 2000). WarpIN 0.9.0 is out now. This is the successor to Alpha #4, but still a developer's release, so don't expect this to be stable. However, lots of improvements have been made, not only to the user interface, but also to the internals. Lots of bugs have been fixed also. Use this version to get to know WarpIN and learn how to use it for your own programs until the first stable version (which will be 1.0.0) comes out.

This version does not include source code. Instead, the WarpIN source code is 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

V0.9.0 (446 KB, Jan 4, 2000) from:

ftp.netlabs.org (FTP, Switzerland)

Still available: Alpha #4 (777 KB, March 3, 1999) from:

ftp.netlabs.org (FTP, Switzerland)

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