tags-search (from etags.el) and compressed files

[Alan]

At url
"http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2002-01/msg00258.html";
Richard Stallman writes (in January 2002):

"etags.el was then upgraded to have the intelligence to search for
files with "compression extension" in case it was not finding the file
with only the original name.

The problem in this area is that only find-tag was extended with this
intelligence.  next-file has not been made more intelligent.

I think it is reasonable to move this code inside of next-file."

I see no evidence that this was ever done.  I am using:

GNU Emacs 24.3.1 (x86_64-apple-darwin, NS apple-appkit-1038.36) of 2013-03-12 
on bob.porkrind.org

and cannot do tags-search within the compressed elisp that comes with it.

I check the bzr repository version of etags.el and it is identical to what is 
in the distribution listed above.