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.
