Request for Features/Ideas: A std.archive package

[Liam McSherry via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, 19 May 2015 at 18:46:34 UTC, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> Support for RAR archives would be nice.

It would be nice, but there isn't a great deal of documentation 
(publicly, at least). The RAR developers provide code for 
extracting it, but the licence forbids reverse engineering. At 
that point, it's murky water and down to law.

For example, the UK's Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act allows 
reverse-engineering (and explicitly supersedes any licences), but 
only under certain conditons. The act states that 
decompilation/reverse-engineering is not allowed if you "[supply] 
the information obtained by the decompiling to any person to whom 
it is not necessary to supply it in order to achieve the 
permitted objective." Whether releasing D source code derived 
from a decompiled binary counts as "[supplying] to any person to 
whom it is not necessary..." is not something I'm qualified to 
determine.

RARLAB have published technotes on the format, but I haven't read 
through them and it is possible that they don't give enough 
information. The technote on the RARLAB website also only seems 
to be for RAR 5.0, so supporting older versions could be an issue.