Free RAR v3 support in File Roller
I know some of you use File Roller like myself and run into the occasional RAR file that is not supported by the unrar-free package. Either I have to ignore the file or be naughty and install the non-free "unrar" package from Ubuntu.
I know there was talk about v3 support here somewhere hopefully making it into Debian/Ubuntu/Trisquel and I am wondering where it is. If there is, will it eventually make it into an upcoming "unrar-free" update? I know some of you talked about it being in a separate ununarchiver (where is it anyways?) program, but if it can be eventually merged into the Gnome File Roller that would be peachy.
You're thinking of something called The Unarchiver: http://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/free-rarv3-extraction
The package is called unarchiver; the command to run it is unar.
Does the unar package at http://packages.trisquel.info/brigantia/unar support RAR v3? I ask becuase the Trisquel package for Brigitania, based on Ubuntu 11.10 is version 1.0-1 but the unar for Precise, based on Ubuntu 12.04, is at 0.99-1. Only the upcoming Quantal release, based off of 12.10 has a 1.x release and is currently at 1.1-2.
I believe it does uncompress RARv3 files... but how about trying it?
By the way, this compression format is useless and it does not hurt to tell it to people sending such files:
- For more than seven years, the best compression rates have been obtained with the XZ format (supported by FileRoller).
- If you do not care that much about the compression rate and want to squeeze many data in no time, just use the GZIP format. That does *not* mean XZ is slow (it is a lot faster than BZIP2) but in comparison with GZIP, any compression method looks slow.
When I need to extract a RAR file (not often), I use unar and lsar
directly, they support also RARv3. I use the frontends only when
someone reports ununrar not working, it should provide an unrar-like
interface so e.g. unchanged File Roller can extract these files using
unar and lsar. I believe Trisquel has unar packaged and not ununrar
(the source is available at http://mtjm.eu/releases/).
(Extraction of only some files from the archive is not supported, since
it wasn't available in unar when I initially wrote ununrar.)
I personally compress in 7z or zip depending on the software the recipient may have. I brought up RAR because I was testing out an emulator over the weekend and the RAR files were version 3. I do admit it is a pain to deal with them but I also understand it would be time consuming for the site admin to recompress so many files in a more open format.
Awesome! I didn't try out unar because of the gnustep dependencies but this should be in Ubuntu 12.10 (and Trisquel 6.5) by default due to them possibly using Gnome 3.6. Hopefully the File Roller support is backported to older releases too.
