rar support in pure Rust

[bitplane]

Hi, first of all, apologies for the spam!

I've spent the last ~6 months working on a pure-Rust rar library (rars crate) that's now reached parity with WinRAR. With the rate of change in software at the moment nobody is likely to find it unless I reach out a bit, so here I am!

It supports better recovery than RAR, is somewhat safer than shelling out to compiled binaries, but could do with more API users / bug reports / testing. A free software RAR replacement is something we've been missing for 30 years and figured it might be something you're looking for.

If not, please feel free to close the ticket and tell me to get lost 😆

Thanks

Gareth

[thedancingdeveloper]

🤖 Vogt validation pass — 2026-08-20 (automated review vs cda68ac)

This is a maintainer decision, not a code defect. Current RAR extraction shells out to the external unrar/7z binaries (crates/nzb-postproc/src/unpack.rs, which documents "RAR: Shell out to `unrar` binary" and builds argv in rar_extract_args_with_unrar; the Debian packaging in apps/rustnzb/Cargo.toml still recommends = "unrar | unrar-free"), so no pure-Rust RAR path exists yet. Whether to adopt the third-party rars crate to drop the external-binary dependency is a product/scope choice — dependency trust, licensing, recovery-record parity, and password-protected volume support all need the maintainer's judgment. Leaving open for that review.