Working with archives

Archives (.zip, .tar.gz, .rar, etc.) are files representing a collection of files and folders, used for transferring a collection of data from one person to another, often through the Internet. Most archives are sent through email, IM, or uploaded to a website. The GNOME Desktop should make working with archives transparent to its users.

Applications such as Epiphany, Empathy, and Evolution should represent archives as folders in their UI. Epiphany and Empathy show an archive as a folder while downloading. Evolution would show attached archives as folders. When an archive is either activated or the download completes, it would auto-extract as a folder.

When sending or uploading collections of files and/or folder(s), an archive will be automatically created and attached to an email, sent over an IM, or uploaded to a website.

Notes

This method of working with archives obsoletes both file-roller and mounting archives as a volume in Nautilus.

Pre-existing archives (such as those downloaded by wget in a terminal, for example) would be shown by an archive icon and would be extracted to a folder when double-clicked upon.

Archives with operating-system specific folders and directories will extract without those OS-specific folders & directories. This pertains, for example, to OS X created .zip archives that create a __MACOS folder and .DS_store files.

Comments

> What is about archives which needs a password?

Well I guess that is not an issue. Usually there are very less number of archives with password since main aim of archives is to ease transferring of data. Whether its about uploading an attachment or downloading all attachment from gmail, most of them are without password but in any case we can always show a pop up like one have when using a gpg private key with passphrase or something like that. That would solve this problem. But I expect this to be a rare case.

> Are you proposing to change all the softwares like empathy, epiphany, evolution to support this feature or do you expect a change in the core that such that third party applications thinks that they are saving a .zip in the filesystem but actually the Gnome is converting it into a folder internally. The second approach won't require changes to be made to all third party application, just a strong integration with gnome shell would be enough for it.

Design/Whiteboards/Archives (last edited 2013-04-20 17:40:41 by PranavKant)