bug#21637: Subject: 24.5; dired-do-compress

[Devon Sean McCullough]

Ask yourself, what would a reasonable user expect?
If “beyond the scope” means “we don't fix problems” well,
yes, times have changed since I was a paid Emacs maintainer.
My answer would’ve been more of the form, hmm… what's the right thing?

When foo.zip contains only names of the form foo/* perhaps ask

        Uncompress foo.zip into directory foo?  (y or n) 

of course if foo already exists, get confirmation before writing to it
and prompt for an alternative directory name if necessary.

Given one of those archives that would spam the containing directory
(I’ve read ancient religious debates on the topic but no matter)
simply derive a directory name from the archive name.

In the case of a one-file archive, just unpack it
making sure to mention the unpacked name.

                Peace
                        —Devon

P.S. Obviously foo.tar would be treated likewise.

On Oct 6, 2015, at 5:57 PM, Glenn Morris <rgm@gnu.org> wrote:

> Devon Sean McCullough wrote:
>> dired-do-compress does foo.zip --> foo.zip.gz, should do foo.zip -->
>> foo instead.
> "Uncompressing" a zip file may (and normally does?) result in multiple
> output files, which is beyond the scope of dired-do-compress,
> in the same way that it does not extract .tar files.