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Re: [found the culprit]


From: Eli Zaretskii
Subject: Re: [found the culprit]
Date: Fri, 16 Nov 2018 09:48:24 +0200

> From: Clément Pit-Claudel <address@hidden>
> Date: Thu, 15 Nov 2018 21:24:43 -0500
> 
> > The meaning of Z is to compress or uncompress.  Extracting an archive is
> > a different operation; it is semantically incoherent for Z to extract
> > an archive.
> > 
> > If we want a Dired command to extract archives, we should add one.
> > It can handle .tgz files as well as .tar files and other archive types.
> 
> I think this distinction (unpacking vs decompressing) is too subtle.  What 
> should we do on formats that support both, like zip?  That is, should Z on a 
> zip archive just change its compression mode to store, without extracting the 
> files?

Where there's only one meaning of Z, there's no problem.  Hardly
anyone would want Z on a zip archive to change the compression method;
that's not what Z is about: it compresses or decompresses, and
decompressing a zip archive _means_ unpacking it.

But with .tar.gz files, decompressing and unpacking are two separate
actions, so there's an ambiguity what Z might mean.  And IMO (and also
in Richard's, AFAIU), the ambiguity should be resolved in the least
surprising way.  Having all the files from an archive extracted
without my explicit permission is a surprise, might even be unpleasant
surprise.



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