unrar-free

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Mon, Feb 11, 2008 at 02:49:59PM +0100, Michael Bienia wrote:
> On 2008-02-11 14:43:37 +0200, Jani Monoses wrote:
> > 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
> `----

That's unfortunate.  It seems it isn't very promising as an alternative, and
we wouldn't want to promote a dead project.

Thanks for this detail.

-- 
 - mdz