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Windows to Finally Support 30 Year Old Archive Format

posted by janrinok on Friday May 26, @05:57PM   Printer-friendly
from the always-at-the-cutting-edge-of-technology dept.

upstart writes:

Windows to Finally Support 30 Year Old Archive Format:

It's been 30 years since Russian software engineer Eugene Roshal created the RAR archive format. RAR allows users to compress files so they take up less room on your hard drive. However, you needed a special program like WinRAR to open RAR files on Windows for the better part of three decades.

That's all changing soon. This week Microsoft quietly announced that Windows 11 will finally support RAR files natively. In a long-winded blog post about the future of AI, the company slipped in RAR support in the "In addition..." section. If you were just casually scrolling through, you may have missed it.

"We have added native support for additional archive formats, including tar, 7-zip, rar, gz and many others using the libarchive open-source project. You now can get improved performance of archive functionality during compression on Windows," the blog post states.

Granted, this move may not matter much to people who have never heard of a RAR file. But, those who work with archive formats know the sheer annoyance of not being able to open a somewhat common file format without special software like WinRAR—a file extraction program that people can pay for but generally don't.

See also: 28 years later, Windows finally supports RAR files submitted by owl.

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by RamiK on Friday May 26, @07:01PM (1 child)

    by RamiK (1813) on Friday May 26, @07:01PM (#1308355)

    non-latin filename support wil be busted, being one of the things the proprietary RAR developer refuses to disclose.

    Can't you just look at RARLAB's UnRAR source and find out? https://www.rarlab.com/rar/unrarsrc-6.2.7.tar.gz [rarlab.com]

    90% of WinRAR's users are Manga pirates

    Every manga reading app I've seen includes built-in handing of rars for CBRs so...

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  • (Score: 1) by namefags_are_jerks on Saturday May 27, @06:35AM

    by namefags_are_jerks (17638) on Saturday May 27, @06:35AM (#1308433)

    > Can't you just look

    It violates the licence. There's a bar on reverse-engineering and using the source as a reference. The FOSS RARs could clean-room their implementations from published specs of WinRAR before that clause appeared.

    RAR has a long history with Warez, although the only time I see it today is for Manga raws sourced by JP rippers, and unfortunately they often create the archive with non-latin directiory names. The better comic reading software parses the archive and internally renames directories, but most of the time, those that rely on libarchive think there's only one directory called "?????????????".

    At least with W11 providing the FOSS archiver and known codepage filenames, the Winny guys will hopefully now move away from using WinRAR...