File Roller With P7zip Broken on Rars

[nullack]

Binary package hint: file-roller

As part of the new changes with Intrepid, gnome has upgraded file roller to use P7zip. Amongst other enhancements this allows for RAR support via P7zip out of the box. It is however broken.

a) trying to extract from a rar archive, file roller will fail to extract and will provide the following:

7-Zip 4.58 beta Copyright (c) 1999-2008 Igor Pavlov 2008-05-05
p7zip Version 4.58 (locale=C,Utf16=off,HugeFiles=on,1 CPU)

Processing archive: blah blah

Extracting blah blah Unsupported Method

Sub items Errors: 1

b) When trying to test a rar achive, a user will also get "Unsupported Method"

Basically rar support is broken through file roller.

Ofcourse a user can use the unrar package via the cli as a workaround until it is fixed.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

upstream commented saying that's not a bug

[nullack (nullack)]

We should not be so quick to get rid of bugs without having consideration to a quality user experience. The gnome feature list states that "File-roller (Archive Manager) now uses p7zip to extract archives, so it supports .alz, .zip, .cbr, .cbz archives, .arj, .rar and .iso files". People naturally expect that stated features will actually be included and that they will work without hassles.

If the root cause of the bug is that the package p7zip-rar is not present, then the solution should be that this package is changed to require p7zip-rar. What happens now is that rar's under file manager fail mysteriously without any assistance about needing the p7zip-rar package.

Im re-opening this to confirmed because its not an invalid bug report.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

the pzip-rar package is non-free and can't be installed by default and there is already a bug about installing required software the way codecs are installed, what else do you suggest there?

[nullack (nullack)]

I appreciate that the RARLABS software is closed source, but RARLABS provides the software as a way for users on non windows environments to extract their format. Ubuntu includes other closed source software in the repos such as the Nvidia drivers. Another example is Adobe Flash.

The so called "free" unrar library (the RARLABS unrar is also "free" as in cost) that is optionally available in the repos as well is feature limited and not reliable for general use cases in my experience. An example is how it fails to extract multiple volume archives when I tried it.

The idea that the required package cannot be included as required for file roller is one which is at odds to other Ubuntu closed source precedents.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

the pzip-rar package is available in ubuntu but it's non-free and can't be shipped on the CD or installed by default, the adobe flash plugin is not available in the default installation either. the drivers are a different topic since they are something required for some user to have working hardware, non-free drivers are not enable by default either though

[nullack (nullack)]

In such a case with Canonical seeing non free hardware drivers as being "higher" than non free software I suggest the best move forward for the users is to close this bug and wait on the enhancement request you mention to overcome the issue with novice users having a mysterious failure with RAR archive extraction by default. I don't know the number of the enhancement and I would appreciate it so I can track & help with testing.