Archiving Modules

[Jorgen Grahn]

On Wed, 2011-02-16, peter wrote:
> I am writing a small Tkinter utility to control archive files in
> multiple formats (mainly for my own amusement and education).
> Basically it presents the user with two adjacent listboxes, one with
> the contents of the target directory and one with the contents of the
> archive. By clicking buttons labelled '<' and '>' the user can copy
> files to and from the archive.  The actual archiving functionality
> derives from the modules zipfile and tarfile.
>
> It all seems to be working fine, but I have two residual queries.
> Firstly for the sake of completeness I would like to include .rar
> archives, but there doesn't seem to be an equivalent rarfile module.
> I use both Windows and Linux on various machines, so need a cross
> platform solution which does not depend on external modules. The only
> one I have found is at http://pypi.python.org/pypi/rarfile/1.0, but it
> seems this does rely on an external module.  Is there anything out
> there?

RAR is a proprietary format, which complicates things. For example,
Linux distributions like Debian cannot distribute software which
handles it.  If Python included such a module, they'd be forced to
remove it from their version.

I wouldn't encourage its use by writing /more/ software which handles
it. IMHO, archives should be widely readable forever, and to be that
they need to be in a widely used, open format.

/Jorgen

-- 
  // Jorgen Grahn <grahn@  Oo  o.   .  .
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