Re: [found the culprit]

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Stefan Monnier <address@hidden>
> Date: Wed, 14 Nov 2018 11:39:56 -0500
> 
> > I do think that Z on a compressed Tar archive, be it a .tar.gz or .tgz
> > file, should not by default unpack the archive.  We could have a
> > special prefix arg to request that, and by default we should just
> > uncompress the file.  But that's a different issue.
> 
> FWIW, I consider ".tar.gz" (or "tar.lz", ...) as the archive format
> (rather than as a combination of tar and compression): since the tar
> format does not support random access anyway there's very little benefit
> to having it uncompressed (unless the content can't be compressed
> e.g. because it's already compressed).

But then 'Z' shouldn't invoke unpacking, because it is documented as
"uncompress" operation.  By unpacking the archive we second-guess the
users, and decide for them that they meant to uncompress a directory
(or several directories), which is just one of two possible
interpretations.

Maybe the solution is to define a new command, "archive", which could
work on one or more files or directories for compression, and remove
the directory compression from what 'Z' does.  Then the inverse for
the new command would both decompress and unpack the archive.