Problem with .rar archives and packages unrar and unar

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#1

I’m experiencing some problems with .rar archives, apparently Ark is unable to handle them.

I checked, and see that the unrar archive was missing, I installed it but this uninstalled unar. Now I can manage .rar archives again.

The problem is that whenever I try to update my system, unar' tries to get installed again, and, for what I understand, this package is meant to substitute unrar, making the latter obsolete and unraris marked for uninstallation. Fine with that, ifunar` was capable to correctly handle .rar files, but it isn’t.

Is this a bug with unar? Is Ark meant to work with unrar but not with unar? Is there some other reason?

Can I safely add a lock to unar to prevent it from getting installed, or is it required by some other packages?

The real problem here is that the default installed packages prevent the correct and expected functionality of (part of ) the system, and to make it work again one has to manually switch packages.

#2

See http://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1083834

Can I safely add a lock to unar to prevent it from getting installed, or is it required by some other packages?

I should be possible, yes.

If it is required by some other packages, zypper will complain anyway. :wink:
FTR, I don’t have unar installed here on my Leap 42.3 system.

Another workaround would probably be to disable the unrar plugin in Ark’s settings (it should use unar directly then).

#3

Although they do not integrate with Ark, both “unar” and “rar” (from Packman) can unpack rar archives from the command line. Use “unar -h” and “rar ?” for usage – “rar” has no man page.

#4

Well, actually unar does integrate with Ark, Ark has a plugin for that.

But it prefers unrar if that’s found.
And unar comes with a wrapper script named “unrar”, which doesn’t work with ark. (apparently its output is different than the one from the real unrar, so Ark doesn’t understand it)

Disabling the RAR plugin in Ark should make it use unar instead, as I wrote.

Although, that will make it impossible to create RAR archives with Ark I suppose (for which it would use rar).

#5

@wolfi

Thank you, I’ve disable the rar plugin from Ark and now I can correclty open and extract archives.

I’m not really interested in archiving with the RAR forma, I only use ZIP and 7Z, so this is solved for me.

Thank you again!

#6

Well only theoretically. I was forced to uninstall unar and go back to unrar.

unar seems to be missing compatibility-wise and will not unpack all rar archives.

#7

Please add this to https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1083834 (same username/password as here).

Thanks.

#8

if I remember correctly unar uses reverse engineered code and can only handle rar 4 archives they don’t support the new rar 5 format

#9

Even more a reason to not forcably replace unrar with unar though… :wink:

#10

yes the only reason I can think off to replace unrar with uar is licensing, as unrar is licensed with the rar free license (not free as in free speech) while unar is GPL’ed (free as in free speech)
on the user side it’s better to keep unrar from the rar developer instead of a reverse engineered compatible library which afaik still didn’t break the unrar license as it can’t create rar files

#11

Yes, that’s probably the reason indeed why they tried to replace it.

unrar is/was only available in the non-oss repo so far.

on the user side it’s better to keep unrar from the rar developer instead of a reverse engineered compatible library which afaik still didn’t break the unrar license as it can’t create rar files

Indeed, that’s my point.
Better keep unrar (or at least not replace it), as long as unar is not a complete replacement.

And that’s what the bug report is about, but the maintainer tried to push the ball to the KDE maintainers to “fix” ark…

Several other people’s comments about problems there in the bug report will probably weigh more though, than me stating the obvious… :wink: