GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 386028
Beagle should support archives compressed with RAR/7z
Last modified: 2018-07-03 09:54:16 UTC
According to the release notes, beagle 0.2.14 can index the contents of zip, tarballs and individual gzip/bzip files. It would be nice if Beagle could support RAR and 7z archives as well, using, if they're present on the system, the external binaries 'unrar' and '7z', which have similar CLI commands and switches.
Hmm, in this case really the best we could probably do would be indexing the list of filenames, probably not the actual contents of the files. Given the memory/cpu spikes we would get from doing this without any throttling (we can't really control what those programs will do) might be a bad move for not very much information. That is of course unless we know of a library that can access rar/7zip files. Just my $0.02
With the new controls added for running external programs, we could control CPU/memory usage. We can't control disk usage, however.
Current the archive filter extracts the archived files in a temporary directory and then indexes them (there are some bounds on the number of files to extract). This model will work very well for rar, ace and other archives. But inherently this is a bad way of indexing archive contents. The archive filter will be changed shortly to try to index the contents in place without extracting the files, as much as possible. That will greatly smoothen the preformance and we can index all the files in an archive. The rar and other compressed file filters would still work as above and its contents will have to be extracted to before indexing. I am not very comfortable with that model. A lot of files on warez/p2p systems are ace-d or rar-ed in multipart archives and it would be a huge waste to extract the contents.
(In reply to comment #0) > It would be nice if Beagle could support RAR and 7z archives as well, using, if > they're present on the system, the external binaries 'unrar' and '7z', which > have similar CLI commands and switches. I have added a external-filter based example to index the names of rar archive contents: http://beagle-project.org/ExternalFiltersRepository#Rar_filter
Beagle is not under active development anymore and had its last code changes in early 2011. Its codebase has been archived (see bug 796735): https://gitlab.gnome.org/Archive/beagle/commits/master "tracker" is an available alternative. Closing this report as WONTFIX as part of Bugzilla Housekeeping to reflect reality. Please feel free to reopen this ticket (or rather transfer the project to GNOME Gitlab, as GNOME Bugzilla is deprecated) if anyone takes the responsibility for active development again.