Replace unrar (unrarsrc) with unrar-free or remove unrar

[Bruce Dubbs]

​https://gitlab.com/bgermann/unrar-free

I've been testing unrar for new versions with looking at ​ftp://ftp.rarlab.com/rar. It looks like that has been shut down.

The upstream website, ​https://www.rarlab.com/, does not mention unrarsrc but does not appear to support open source software. They want $29 for a binary.

We reference unrar in three places: xarchiver (optional), ark (recommended), and file-roller (optional runtime).

An alternative is to just drop unrar or label unrar-free as external.

I think ark's use of unrar can be optional. In my log for ark:

-- Found unrar executable: /usr/bin/unrar
CMake Warning at plugins/clirarplugin/CMakeLists.txt:32 (message):
  Could not find the rar executable.  Ark won't be able to create or edit RAR
  archives.

-- Found 7-Zip executable: /usr/bin/7z
-- Found unzip executable: /usr/bin/unzip
-- Found zip executable: /usr/bin/zip
CMake Warning at plugins/cliunarchiverplugin/CMakeLists.txt:28 (message):
  Could not find the unar executable.  Ark requires unar or unrar to extract
  RAR archives.

Which seems contradictory.

[Douglas R. Reno]

I'm definitely not in favor of removing unrar without a suitable replacement, such as unrar-free. I'm a Windows user, and I suspect most people in academia or other fields have at least one Windows machine around. WinRAR is still a very popular archiver software for Windows, so we should keep something.

I'd prefer unrar-free here. unar is a lot more powerful, and has a bunch of extra things that it supports (such as StuffIt Expander files from Macs), but requires the Obj-C compiler from GCC and some GnuSTEP components which would be much more involved than just changing to unrar-free. If others are in favor though, unar is also a good option (though again it requires that we users have GCC reinstalled in BLFS with obj-c and that GnuSTEP components are added).

[martyj19]

I find that navigating to

https://www.rarlab.com/rar_add.htm

and then "UnRAR source" has been and continues to work as a usable download for the current release. The directory ​https://www.rarlab.com/rar/ that it points into is however 403 when accessed as a directory.

[Bruce Dubbs]

Replying to martyj19:

I find that navigating to

https://www.rarlab.com/rar_add.htm

and then "UnRAR source" has been and continues to work as a usable download for the current release. The directory ​https://www.rarlab.com/rar/ that it points into is however 403 when accessed as a directory.

I'll see if I can fix the currency script to use that, but I'm a bit uncomfortable with it.

[Bruce Dubbs]

For now I was able to update currency for unrarsrc using the URL marty suggested. We can leave updating to unrar-free for another day.

Closing.

[Bruce Dubbs]

Milestone renamed