Comment 42 for bug 389176

To add my 2 cents, I'm against the feature, using the following logic:

Users either know what an archive file is or do not.

If they do, they realize it's a file that you open to view the contents of an archive. If it auto-extracts, they'll be surprised and (I at least would be) annoyed.

If they don't, then what they see is a file named xyz.zip, and when they double click on it their computer starts humming and everything slows down, and a mysterious folder named xyz/ shows up. If they know that the contents of xyz/ are the contents of xyz.zip, then they fall into the category of "know what an archive file is." If they don't, then they'll be surprised and probably confused.
Furthermore, what if they don't immediately realize what happened, and 'open' it twice? Some sort of "overwrite existing directory?" dialog would have to come up, and the user in question is left in the dark as to which directory, why it's being overwritten, and what all this has to do with opening a the file xyz.zip.

The root of this bug seems to be that archives are confusing, and not that Ubuntu handles them poorly. If we change something, I'd recommend something like a first time dialog in file roller in the flavor of "What is an archive file?" Or else make the archive file interface and the Nautilus interface similar/the same.

(incidentally I'm ignoring implementation issues like what to do with *.jar files, or on my computer *.exe files seem to default to opening with archive manager. Plus what if the user lacks write permissions in the folder? Double click on the archive and get an "Extraction Failed: Permission Denied" error? Then the user is spared from knowing what an archive is, at the expense of having to know what file permissions are. This is particularly applicable to downloaded archives stored in /tmp, or archives from another's home folder)

Anyways, that's my opinion on the issue. Giving opinions is always easy...