rar support in next version?

[Guest]

The current zip support (open as folders) is really nice.
So I am storing my config/ini files as zip.

But I actually like rar much better so all my other files are stored as rar. See, it is little inconvenient.

Are you going to add rar support in the next version? I've seen unrar.dll being used in quite some freeware so I suppose it is not an issue in programming or license.

Thanks!

[Chris]

Re: rar support in next version?

Rar support is on the wish list.

There are free libraries for reading Rar files, but I think support for creating Rars would require purchasing some type of license.

[Guest]

Re: rar support in next version?

Right, I forgot it would need to re-create a rar if I choose to update any files in it.

Thanks! Look forward to seeing this feature.

[Zoë]

Re: rar support in next version?

I think I should clarify the situation a bit:

RarLabs does not have a library available for creating or modifying rar files, and the license for unrar.dll prohibits using it to create a compatible compressor. Until that changes, we can not support modifying rar files. If you need better compression than zip gives, I'd suggest using Tar.Bz2, 7Zip, Tar.Gz, or Cab. We're much more likely to support creating and modifying those.

However, the reason zip gets worse compression than all of those formats (including rar), is that it's designed for incremental updates. It's easy and fast to change a single file in a zip. The rest of the formats compress everything as a single lump, so if you add, change or delete a single file, it still has to recompress everything. I've tested incremental updates of tar.gz in BC2, and it's much slower. Even after we add support for modifying those formats, you should still stick with zip if you plan to modify the files stored in them.

[Guest]

Re: rar support in next version?

Ehm, interesting. Thanks for the info.