Windows: Installer or portable .exe?

[fonsp]

On Windows, Julia has the option to download an installer (is this user or system level?), or a portable .exe. I remember that in my high school, I was able to run portable exes, but not installers, maybe this is still common for school computers.

VS Code offers all options: user installer, system installer and a "portable exe" (a zip containing the full installation and Code.exe).

Some questions:

• Right now we have an installer, right?
  • Is this a user or system level installer?
• Can a portable exe self-update? Might be interesting to download an old VS Code zip, run it, and ask it to update itself.
• Are there situations (like in my old high school) where people would only be able to use Pluto if it was a portable exe?
  • In these situations, would a portable Julia exe with Pkg.add("Pluto") work?

[ctrekker]

Here are my thoughts:

• The executable we currently package is an installer
  • By default it's installed on a system level, although I think the installer has a configuration option for making it user-level
• Portables can probably self-update, although I've never heard of it being done
• There are definitely situations where this is useful, my university doesn't allow customized system installs either

One issue might be figuring out where to locally install Julia. It would be great if we could somehow package the Julia executable entirely within the PlutoDesktop executable. In principle I think its possible, but I've never done anything like that before.

[fonsp]

Ah then let's start by making it a user-level installer, right?

I think we already bundle Julia and the julia depot in the installer, take a look!