Use p7zip for RAR archives?

Thanks for your bug. I've forwarded your request upstream: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=343201

I checked out the situation on my new AMD64 Edgy system.

 unrar-free can't even extract uncompressed files from rar archives created with rar 3.0.

 7z can get the uncompressed files (method m0g), but can't extract the compressed files (e.g. method m3g). So it does look like 7z is better.

 unrar (non-free) is available (now, if it wasn't before) in multiverse, and works even on compressed rar 3.0 files (e.g. v2.9, compression method m3g).

peter@tesla:~$ file /usr/bin/unrar
/usr/bin/unrar: ELF 64-bit LSB executable, AMD x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), for GNU/Linux 2.6.0, dynamically linked (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.6.0, stripped

 unrar is non-free, but open source, so it should be available on any arch. Still, using 7z for Free rar support would be an improvement.

I'd actually like to expand this request to be used for any formats it supports. Reason being that 7z tends to be marginally more efficient than other archivers, but more importantly, it's multithreaded and is *much* faster than the standard tools on multicore systems with fast disks.

this has been fixed upstream now, thanks for reporting.

This bug was fixed in the package file-roller - 2.23.4-0ubuntu1

---------------
file-roller (2.23.4-0ubuntu1) intrepid; urgency=low

  * New upstream version:
    New features and user visible changes:
    - Added support for reading and extracting alz archives
    - Added support for rzip compressed files
    - Added support for creating self-extracting zip archives.
    - Added ability to create multi-volume archives.
    - Added support for header encryption. Implemented header encryption for
      7zip and rar archives.
    - Use the 7z command to read/write zip, cbr, cbz archives, and to
      read cabinet, arj, rar and iso archives.
    - Try to get the mime type from magic numbers if all other methods fail.
    - Now the progress dialog is exact when adding, extracting or deleting
      files for tar, zip, rar and 7zip archives (lp: #18250)
    - Do not add the backup files, that is files ending with ~, to the archive.
    - Operations are now more efficient for archives with a long file list.
    Bugfixes:
    - Fixed bug #343201 – Use p7zip for RAR archives? (lp: #44958)
    - Fixed bug #529395 – file-roller will not open 256 AES zip files
    - Fixed bug #515194 – PK 4.5 Zip files
    - Fixed bug #519046 – add x-cbr and x-cbz support (lp: #196171)
    - Fixed bug #336790 – file-roller can't open winzip-10 encrypted files
    - Fixed bug #539629 – Create archive for Trash/Computer
    - Fixed bug #506698 – 7z Filename (header) Encryption request
    - Fixed bug #542541 – icon lookup code is broken
    - Fixed bug #504584 – Incorrect comportment when extracting multi part
      rar files.
   Internal code:
    - Simplified the way to register commands.
    - Allow to compile with Gtk+ 2.12 as well.
  * debian/file-roller.mime:
    - updated to list new mimetypes
  * debian/patches/60_correct_libtool_usage.patch:
    - use AC_PROG_CC since that's required when using the new libtool version
  * debian/patches/70_autoconf.patch:
    - new version update

 -- Sebastien Bacher <email address hidden> Tue, 22 Jul 2008 09:33:36 +0200