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Don't Use RAR

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Re: Don't Use RAR

#211

Post by gompertz »

xtracto wrote: post #149
ihateolives wrote: post #37

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…

I'll be the one to say it: because a large majority of programmers are liberals, democrats, and anti-capitalist. And they feel everyone else should be too.

Re: Don't Use RAR

#212

Post by ronjouch »

ronjouch wrote: post #198
btdmaster wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Par2 is always an option, and RAR implements Reed-Solomon error correcting codes and there are many recent implementations of those: https://github.com/klauspost/reedsolomon .

I'm sure there is a public algorithm / implementation. My question here is: is there an existing archive format (like .7z) that integrates it to the archive format and knows to update the error-correction data on archive update? Maybe not in a way that is as user-friendly as RAR, but "halfway there". Or are you suggesting all my .7z files should come with a sibling .par2, that I must remember to regenerate after ever…

A by-the-way note for passerbys on the subject of PAR recovery records:

- As usually, the Arch wiki has an excellent page on the topic: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Parchive

- Hey, par3 is in the works: https://github.com/Parchive/par3cmdline/issues/1

- I created [Feature request / par2create] Option to regenerate par2 files if input file changed : https://github.com/Parchive/par2cmdline/issues/170

Re: Don't Use RAR

#213

Post by CRConrad »

xtracto wrote: post #149
ihateolives wrote: post #37

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…

> 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...

You're saying that in a "Gotcha!" tone, as if you've caught these people out in an inconsistency.

You haven't; there is no such inconsistency. Closed source can be bad even if SaaS is even worse.

Re: Don't Use RAR

#214

Post by CRConrad »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #123
DocTomoe wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone remember .zoo? Those were the days...

I do now that you mentioned it. And there was an archive format starting with LZ* right? LZW? LZJ? I mainly hit that one when downloading .MOD music. (Edit, huh, .ZOO was based on LSW, so maybe I'm conflating the two)

LZW sounds familiar, LZJ doesn't.

Re: Don't Use RAR

#215

Post by CRConrad »

ryandrake wrote: post #206
Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What really bothers me now are movies being distributed over torrents as a multi-volume RAR. Just...why? The BitTorrent protocol will handle corrupt data and fix it at the segment level. You won't have to redownload an entire file. Splitting a file into pieces made sense 20+ years ago when connections (Both your physical ISP connection and the logical TCP connection) were unstable, web servers didn't always support d…

I think what we're seeing maybe can be chalked up to distributors adhering to their group's internal rules that just haven't changed since the 90s. Another likely "Scene rule" thing that lasted a long while were movies that were encoded aiming for a particular size. The quality was tuned up down such that every release was exactly 700MB. Why 700MB? Well, turns out there is an ancient form of data storage called CD-RO…

> Well, turns out there is an ancient form of data storage called CD-ROM

Heh, "ancient"... Geroffmylawn, you punks.

Re: Don't Use RAR

#216

Post by CRConrad »

unfocussed_mike wrote: post #93
pmichaud wrote: post #83

I’m not fully convinced of my own position here, but I have long suspected that “zipping” at all is an abstraction that shouldn’t really be exposed to the user. Like it’s a throwback to an earlier era. The basic trade off is size for speed, and it seems like most cases it could handled automatically at the level of the file system maybe. Like if I have a big file that I want to send, it sort of feels like the softwar…

> Why can’t folders be automatically treated like singular archives when I try to do operations on them for which that makes sense? Why do I have to think about these details? Operating systems do blur the boundaries of this a bit, now -- you can explore zip files as if they were folders, mount disk images from files, and you can work with folders as bundles (e.g. a macOS application is a disguised bundle, an RTFD do…

> Operating systems do blur the boundaries of this a bit, now -- you can explore zip files as if they were folders, mount disk images from files, and you can work with folders as bundles (e.g. a macOS application is a disguised bundle, an RTFD document is a directory with contents etc.)

Also, AIUI, "Save entire page" in some browsers. You might think that should be a single .html file, but it's usually an .html file plus a directory of stuff linked in that file / on that Web pge, that the browser (and sometimes the OS) then does its best to pretend is just a single file.

Re: Don't Use RAR

#218

Post by LinuxBender »

rvz wrote: post #18
darkhorn wrote: post #7

Quoted post unavailable.

and? Everyone is using nginx and that was made by a Russian, does that mean we should stop using it? This is why 'guilt by association' doesn't work with your 'point' .

To add to this, it may also be worth noting that Russian developers have contributed quite heavily to Linux, BSD, Microsoft Windows and Solaris. I can only assume also MacOS.
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