Re: [found the culprit]

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > I can't speak for Richard, but my response to
  > your question would be that if, as in the case
  > of zip, there is _no distinction_, then we need
  > not distinguish.  We can just do what we do now:
  > perform that atomic action.

Uncompression produces one file which corresponds to the original
file.  You can type Z again and recompress it.

Unpacking one archive file can result in multiple files.
It is misleading semantically to identify this with uncompression.

A Dired command to unpack an archive might lead to confusing results,
because the unpacked files might be outside the directory you are
operating on.

I do not see how to support packing an archive in Dired, because I do
not see a clean and simple way to specify which files to put in it.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation (https://gnu.org, https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)