Calibre and rar support
Thanks to the cooperation with upstream authors and the maintainer Martin Pitt, the Calibre package in Debian is now up-to-date at version 3.4.0, and has adopted a more standard packaging following upstream. In particular, all the desktop files and man pages have been replaced by what is shipped by Calibre. What remains to be done is work on RAR support.
Rar support is necessary in the case that the eBook uses rar as compression, which happens quite often in comic books (cbr extension). Calibre 3 has split out rar support into a dynamically loaded module, so what needs to be done is packaging it. I have prepared a package for the Python library unrardll which allows Calibre to read rar-compressed ebooks, but it depends on the unrar shared library, which unfortunately is not built in Debian. I have sent a patch to fix this to the maintainer, see bug 720051, but without reaction from the maintainer.
Thus, I am publishing updated packages for unrar shipping also libunrar5, and unrardll Python package in my calibre repository. After installing python-unrardll Calibre will happily import meta-data from rar-compressed eBooks, as well as display them.
deb http://www.preining.info/debian/ calibre main
deb-src http://www.preining.info/debian/ calibre main
The releases are signed with my Debian key 0x6CACA448860CDC13
Enjoy
Why doesn’t upstream support unar? It is Free Software and available in Debian:
http://unarchiver.c3.cx/
https://packages.debian.org/sid/unar
Might be nice, but as far as I can see there is no shared library provided, right? It would be nice to patch python-unrardll to use an alternative unrar library, though. Any ideas/suggestions concerning shared libs providing the same features?
Nice to see an update to calibre. Though currently it is uninstallable in sid due to the pyqt5 transistion.
I’ll recompile or upload a new version when the transition is over, but that will take a bit of time.