Archiving Modules

[Alexander Kapps]

On 18.02.2011 19:51, Westley Martínez wrote:
> On Fri, 2011-02-18 at 04:55 -0800, peter wrote:
>> On Feb 17, 9:55 pm, Jorgen Grahn<grahn+n... at snipabacken.se>  wrote:
>>
>>
>>> 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.
>>
>> Good point, and one that I did not appreciate.  But there are freeware
>> applications such as jzip (http://www.jzip.com) which can handle .rar
>> files, so there must be a way round it.
>>
>>> 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.
>>
>> I agree, but if a file is only available as a rar archive I would like
>> to be able to extract it without using another 3rd party application.
>>
>> peter
> Freeware is still proprietary software.

While I agree with the general refusal of .rar or other non-free 
archive formats, a useful archiving tool should still be able to 
extract them. Creating them is an other issue.

There is a free (open source) un-rar for Linux which AFAIK can at 
least handle .rar archives below v3.

HTH