Debian Package of the Day (static archived copy)

Entry submitted by François Ingelrest. DPOTD needs your help, please contribute !

Do you often download some binary content from Usenet servers? Then you know what .par2 files are useful for, and that there is no decent GUI to handle them.

For those who don’t know par2, let’s make it simple: it’s an utility used to protect files against data loss. It’s able to do that by creating redundant data (“parity files”). For example, if you create parity files with a redundancy level of 5%, you may be able to recover your original files if the amount of corrupted data is less than 5% (corrupted data may be located anywhere in any files). Such parity files may be used whenever data loss is expected: Usenet servers, cheap CD/DVD ROMs…

To check/repair some files, or to create these parity files, you have to open a terminal and use the command line. This works flawlessly but this not really user friendly, especially for distributions aimed at human beings. There exists a replacement named gpar2, but it uses some extra libraries and I’m sure that many of you don’t like to install extra libraries when it’s not really needed.

PyPar2 is a simple graphical frontend, written in Python: thus even if a package is not available for you system, you don’t have to compile anything. Here is how it looks like:

PyPar2 is designed to be very easy to use. Here are a list of its features:

• Advanced settings are available, but hidden by default
• There is no preferences dialog, all selected options are automatically saved and restored
• Multiple languages are available:
• English
• French
• German
• Polish

PyPar2 is available in Debian unstable/testing and Ubuntu Feisty repositories. The “final” 1.0 release is coming soon, with many code changes, so stay tuned! If you would like to add support for a new language, please contact me first at Athropos - AT - gmail - DOT - com to be sure to use the latest language definition.

Links:

• Homepage
• Screenshots