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Don't Use RAR

group.miletic.net

171–180 of 218 posts

Re: Don't Use RAR

#172
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, bad example, imagine I would be sending you ... text files or something. The point I was trying to make was how viable it is, not how useful it is.

Yes please zip there too since i don't think it would be gigabytes of text. If sending gigabytes of text please use lzip ;)

> If sending gigabytes of text please use lzip ;)

I had to look up lzip.

Re: Don't Use RAR

#173
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume you mean command line? The 7zip UI appears to set threads to the number of CPUs by default for LZMA2, and hits 100% on all cores. Zip format also defaults threads to number of CPUs, but only hit 30% CPU (over 16 threads) on some test data.

Yes, I mean command line; it is a long time that I used the gui, though I don't think it is updated often. With command line, I arrived eventually to a set of switches to use, but the -mt option seems to allocate core per file. That means, that if the filesizes of the archived files are not somewhat distributed, it won't work very well. The extreme is, if you have one huge file and few small ones, the small ones will…

> the -mt option seems to allocate core per file

this can't be true in solid archive mode, which should almost always be used (otherwise you might as well use zip). also:

  $ tee {1..10}  11
  $ time 7z a x.7z {1..11}; rm x.7z
  7-Zip (z) 21.07 (x64) : Copyright (c) 1999-2021 Igor Pavlov : 2021-12-26
   64-bit locale=en_US.UTF-8 Threads:12, ASM
  
  Scanning the drive:
  11 files, 78888917 bytes (76 MiB)
  
  Creating archive: x.7z
  
  Add new data to archive: 11 files, 78888917 bytes (76 MiB)
  
  Files read from disk: 11
  Archive size: 2680630 bytes (2618 KiB)
  Everything is Ok
  7z a x.7z {1..11}  19.89s user 0.09s system 205% cpu 9.733 total
  $ time 7z a -mmt=1 x.7z {1..11}; rm x.7z
  7-Zip (z) 21.07 (x64) : Copyright (c) 1999-2021 Igor Pavlov : 2021-12-26
   64-bit locale=en_US.UTF-8 Threads:12, ASM
  
  Scanning the drive:
  11 files, 78888917 bytes (76 MiB)
  
  Creating archive: x.7z
  
  Add new data to archive: 11 files, 78888917 bytes (76 MiB)
  
  Files read from disk: 11
  Archive size: 2779833 bytes (2715 KiB)
  Everything is Ok
  7z a -mmt=1 x.7z {1..11}  21.88s user 0.05s system 99% cpu 21.943 total

Re: Don't Use RAR

#174
Here I thought it was going to be because the RAR tools are all still single threaded and get their pants blown off by anything that can spread the work across the cores on any modern chip.

Re: Don't Use RAR

#175

Interesting that the warez scene adopted RAR as the standard for packaging up pirated works. The alternatives like 7z save more bytes, yet RAR somehow became the winner. Anyone know why?

It's just a part of the scene. Momentum is a hell of a thing to stop in that respect. I don't know if 7zip or any other format will spit out chunked files in 50MB or 100MB part files for "easier" distribution. I say "easier" because it's the poor mans format to send files without using offsets to resume downloads.

Re: Don't Use RAR

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can use an par2 file for that though. Yes, might be less convenient than having it built into the archive in some cases but on the other hand you can a) only download the .par2 file if you need it and b) use it to add error correction to files without putting them in an archive so you can access them directly and c) you can create the error correction information across multiple archives if you want.

This sounds sooo much like that "dropbox? Just use rsync" comment. I don't think you'll get why having all in a simple to use solution is superior for several of us.

the dropbox joke is that nobody would use dropbox, which is obviously false in hindsight. but nobody is claiming that nobody uses rar, but instead that nobody should use rar. the same argument is valid of dropbox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Dropbox.

Re: Don't Use RAR

#177

Interesting that the warez scene adopted RAR as the standard for packaging up pirated works. The alternatives like 7z save more bytes, yet RAR somehow became the winner. Anyone know why?

Most likely because it is older. WinRAR was first released 1995 according to Wikipedia, 7-Zip 1999.

Re: Don't Use RAR

#178

Interesting that the warez scene adopted RAR as the standard for packaging up pirated works. The alternatives like 7z save more bytes, yet RAR somehow became the winner. Anyone know why?

RAR's initial release was 1993, 7z's 1999. IIRC, I remembered seeing RAR's in the scene around 1995, 1996 or so. My take: RAR handled splitting to multiple arbitrary-sized volumes more gracefully than ARJ/ARC which were CLI first and never had a Windows GUI that was as nicely polished as WinRAR was. SFVs made error checking and redownloading corrupted volumes easy without relying on the compression format to handle it. ACE just came too late.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_(warez)

Edit: another major use case overlooked here: a considerable amount of media applications will stream files from within a RAR archive without manually unarchiving beforehand, making them more accessible from file storage sites like mega, 1fichier, without carrying the external appearance/negative baggage of an mp4 or mkv.

Re: Don't Use RAR

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The license is the strongest argument to not use RAR. Why? Most of the daily tools that keep business world running are closed source. Excel. Or Photoshop. Or Windows/MacOS itself. But RAR license and not being open source is now pushing it too far? Really?

The same people that moan about some software being closed source will come back later crying because said software became a SaaS internet business with monthly fees... There's nothing wrong with closed source for profit software. I'll never understand why people in this field push to discredit a honest way to earn money from the work they do... It's as if Medics would cry because other medics are charging them for a…

> It's as if Medics would cry because other medics are charging them for a medical visit. Dirty medics trying to profit from their knowledge and time!!

No, it's as if one medic told another medic "you're not allowed to use any knowledge you got from my visit to help your patients unless you pay me".

Re: Don't Use RAR

#180
post #96

Does anyone know why RAR is better compression-wise than the two more modern standards? It doesn't seem like it's been updated in a long time, and I would have expected modern software from two of the best houses in the world to handily beat it. Is it that good, or is it a matter of priorities, or something else?

>>Does anyone know why RAR is better compression-wise than the two more modern standards? Because RAR was original compression algorith(I suspect - collection of different algorithms that are applied for different cases) and those two others are based on ONE generic algorithm, which is dumb. >>It doesn't seem like it's been updated in a long time Because rar is perfect and what I need. I'm still using RAR files - not…

> WINRAR License is least concern for me, because when WinRAR was created, there were different times, when there was an idea, that auhor(and maintainer) should have all the legal rights to his work(and that also includes compensation) - not some company, that is employing talents.

The rights to WinRAR are held by a company, not an individual.

> Also, closed propiertary sources were historically better for security.

This is not true and was never true.

> Also, 7z even nowadays havce some limitations, which requires workarounds, which is time consuming in archive creation.

Like what?

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