Re: cpio-mode version 0.08

[Michael Albinus]

Douglas Lewan <address@hidden> writes:

> Michael,

Hi Doug,

> So far, I've downloaded source for emacs 26.1 and built it
> (in a somewhat hobbled development environment -- no X development,
> no image support, without gnutls).
> I've loaded tramp and url-tramp and opened test files (with names
> ending in '.cpio).
> All I get is "File not found and directory is write-protected".
>
> I assume I'm missing something. Can you help?

tramp-archive.el is new in Emacs 27 and Tramp 2.4. So you might use
latest sources from either Emacs or Tramp repository.

> Also, a quick look suggests that libarchive may not be universally
> available.  I'm a big fan of portability, if it's possible, so, if
> that's the case, then I might prefer to avoid it. Any thoughts?

Yes, that's a problem. Maybe we could do something like Emacs does for
dired. Where applicable, it uses the external "ls" command, otherwise it
uses the ls-lisp library.

This means, we should use an Elisp implementation (like your cpio code)
on systems which have no libarchive(3) support, for the cost of
supporting less archive formats. The upper interface would still be a
file name handler like tramp-archive provides as of today; all other
packages using this wouldn't care the underlying implementation.

Best regards, Michael.