Hi, maintainers of unar and unrar-free, as you might have seen on the BTS, I have today filed a bug report on unrar-free and revisited an old bug, both of which make unrar-free largely unusable [1][2]. I found that unrar-free seems to be umaintained and has not had any commits by upstream for the last 6+ years, and important bugs are open and ignored.
I found that the unar command from theunarchiver, which is even recommended by the FSF [3], can handle multipart, modern RAR archives just fine, only the command-line is incompatible to unrar-free and unrar-nonfree [4]. One issue is that some tools in Debian, among which are usenet clients, comic book readers, and others, rely on the syntax of unrar-nonfree, for some reason I do not know, maybe because it works, in contrast to unrar-free. I guess the command-line compatibility in unrar-free has been added for this very reason, but it failed to become a drop-in replacement for unrar-nonfree because it exits uncleanly on passing some unrar-free options, and in general does not provide the functionality of unrar-nonfree. My proposal is to remove unrar-free from Debian, for the reasons mentioned above, and add a patch to src:unar that include a wrapper script that provides a command-line wrapper compatible to both unrar-free and unrar-nonfree, so unar can become a drop-in replacement for both. I would like to create th ewrapper script and resulting patch, but first, I would like to hear your thoughts about my research and proposal. Cheers, Nik [1]: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=724295 [2]: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=270751 [3]: https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/free-rarv3-extraction [4]: http://manpages.debian.net/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=unrar-free -- <burny> Ein Jabber-Account, sie alle zu finden; ins Dunkel zu treiben und ewig zu binden; im NaturalNet, wo die Schatten droh'n ;)! PGP-Fingerprint: 3C9D 54A4 7575 C026 FB17 FD26 B79A 3C16 A0C4 F296
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