Re: Using libunrar in KArchive?

On Thursday 27 March 2014 12:36:52 Sune Vuorela wrote:
> On 2014-03-27, David Faure <[email protected]> wrote:
> > Do you think it would be possibly to make karchive optionally depend on
> > libunrar, for *extracting* rar files (with no support for creating rar
> > files)?
> > 
> > The license for libunrar has limitations, but AFAICS only "do not recreate
> > the compression algorithm", so if we don't do that, would it be a
> > problem?
>
> It would be code that none of the big distributions would ship, so I'm
> not sure it would be that ... useful.

OK. Since I will write this code anyway (a customer needs it), this only 
leaves one question - is it ok to put it in karchive anyway? As you say the 
distros will not provide the optional dependency so it won't be compiled, but 
having the code in there in the first place isn't a problem, right?

The alternative is to host the code elsewhere (playground, github...) but that 
makes it harder (I might need access to karchive_p.h).

> The big distributions wouldn't ship it because it violates the four
> freedoms / the opensource definition / the debian free software
> guidelines

I see.

> maybe looking at librarification of 'unar' would be a better approach ?

I had a look, and that's Objective-C. Apart from the issue of the 
unfamiliarity with the language, I wonder what it means in terms of 
integration with a C++ library and compiler requirements...

-- 
David Faure, [email protected], http://www.davidfaure.fr
Working on KDE, in particular KDE Frameworks 5