unrar-free

[Michael Bienia]

On 2008-02-11 14:43:37 +0200, Jani Monoses wrote:
> Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> > I didn't know about unrar-free until it was mentioned on
> > ubuntu-devel-discuss recently.  It takes up a trivial amount of space and
> > (judging by some of the how-tos I see out there) would be appropriate to
> > include by default, assuming file-roller knows how to use it.
> 
> It does not support newer rar files and I am not sure how common those are.
> "
> Description: Unarchiver for .rar files
>   Unrar can extract files from .rar archives. Can't handle some archives in
>   the RAR 3.0 format, only the non-free "unrar" package can do that.
> "

Citing Steinar H. Gunderson from the unrar-free/unrar-nonfree discussion
on the debian-devel ML in May 2005:

,----[ http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/05/msg01029.html ]-
| On Fri, May 20, 2005 at 09:55:08PM +0200, Rudi Effe wrote:
| > the unfree packages have been renamed to unrar-nonfree. the unrar 
| > package in main is free - but does not support some current rar 
| > features.
| 
| "Some current rar features" is an understatement -- it doesn't support RAR
| 3.x archives at all (close to nobody makes new RAR 2.x archives nowadays).
`----

Following from homepage of unrar [0] to the homepage of unrarlib [1] it
doesn't suggest that the situation has improved:
,----[ http://www.unrarlib.org/ ]-
| Please note: further development of unrarlib has been stopped. The
| current version is stable but supports only old RAR2 archives.
| If you need to read RAR3 archives, please use the WinRAR or the
| original unrar source code. Java developers may have a look at Erik
| Larssons work.
| 
| Christian Scheurer, 2007-10-23
`----

0: https://gna.org/projects/unrar/
1: http://www.unrarlib.org/

Michael