Starting with V0.9.14, WarpIN also supports self-installing archives, which are regular WPI files with an executable stub. Those archives will have the .EXE extension and will run on their own, even if WarpIN is not installed locally.

There are three types of self-installing archives:

  1. In the simplest case, the .EXE file is simply the WPI file with an executable stub (usually the STUB.EXE file in your WarpIN directory). If you double-click on such an executable, the stub will only search for whether WarpIN is already installed on the system. If so, the local WarpIN installation is used for installing the archive. If WarpIN is not installed locally, the installation will fail with an error message.

    The advantage of using the .EXE type over plain .WPI files is that the download problems that many users have experienced with WPI files are avoided. Besides, if the user doesn't know what a WPI file is and where to get WarpIN, the executable will display a message where to get WarpIN if it's not installed.

  2. It is also possible to include a minimal WarpIN itself with the executable archive. If WarpIN is then not installed on the system, a temporary WarpIN is extracted from the archive and is then used for installing whatever else is in the archive. However, if WarpIN is already installed locally, that local copy is used to allow for proper deinstalls.

    This method is useful if, as an archive creator, you do not want to force your users to install WarpIN separately before they can install your archive. However, to be able to properly deinstall your archive, your users must still have a full WarpIN installed.

  3. Finally, an archive creator may choose to include a full WarpIN installation and maybe install WarpIN together with the application to be installed.

    An example of this type is the WarpIN distribution itself. Starting with V0.9.14, WarpIN itself is distributed as an .EXE file -- this is how the WarpIN installation works now.

The default executable stub that comes with WarpIN (STUB.EXE) supports all these three methods.

To support installing itself, the package indices 30000 and above have been reserved for WarpIN itself. See "WIC -- Add mode" for details.