Calibre and rar support – again
I have written here several times about Calibre, as well as my trials to get RAR support into the non-free part of Debian, mostly because I have also a few cbr files that I want to see supported. Unfortunately, the maintainer of unrar-nonfree hasn’t been responsive, so let’s go salvaging …
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.
This has passed now the time-frame of a year, so I have decided to “salvage” unrar-nonfree. Package salvaging has been recently introduced into the Debian ecosystem to step in between leaving the package in dire state and the full MIA process:
Package salvaging is the process by which one attempts to save a package that, while not officially orphaned, appears poorly maintained or completely unmaintained. This is a weaker and faster procedure than orphaning a package officially through the powers of the MIA team. Salvaging a package is not meant to replace MIA handling, and differs in that it does not imply anything about the overall activity of a maintainer. Instead, it handles a package maintainership transition for a single package only, leaving any other package or Debian membership or upload rights (when applicable) untouched.
– Debian Developers Reference
I have now started this process by filing a Intent to Salvage bug, though I still hope that the original maintainer takes up interest again. Baring any reaction from the maintainer, I will upload an updated unrar-nonfree package to the DELAYED queue in about three weeks. After it has been transitioned through this DELAYED queue and entered unstable, I will upload unrardll package to provide support for Calibre.
In the meantime, an updates unrar-nonfree package, as well as the preliminary unrardll package are available on my local repository which are signed with my Debian key 0x6CACA448860CDC13
deb http://www.preining.info/debian/ unstable main
deb-src http://www.preining.info/debian/ unstable main
After installing python-unrardll Calibre will happily import meta-data from rar-compressed eBooks, as well as display them.
Enjoy
An alternative might be to use the new DFSG-free libunarr library:
https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=libunarr
Wasn’t it you who pointed me at that the last time, too? 😉
Unfortunately these are completely incompatible libraries, and adjusting the unrardll code to use the unarr library seems a bit of a challenge, especially since the unarr library doesn’t give very detailed access to the rar file structure. Comparing the two header files didn’t give me much hope.
Hi, have you removed the packages from your repository? I was trying to install them precisely to get calibre to work wit CBR comics, but they seem to have disappeared.
Hi, yes the packages are removed from my personal sure because you can install everything from Debian already 😉 linunrar is available as well as unrardll.