Comment 16 for bug 15495

What I find interesting about this design bug is that the very concepts are clashing with the way it works. If you talk of compressed files then you could easily be talking about a directory of txt.gz files, which would technically each be compressed with gzip compression.

On the other hand the reason tar was separated from gzip and bz2 was because it performs a different function, it collects files together into a virtual folder that can also be compressed.

What would be nice (and kind of out of scope for this bug) would be to remove the file-roller and integrate into the OS the ability to treat a tar as a folder and treat compression as a file / folder access filter. I don't know if you'd just want to do it in nautilus or if you'd want to do it lower down the stack, but it'd certainly be much clearer if you 'Compressed a Folder' and you could still access the contents and such, selecting folders in file dialogs for attachments and uploads could be filtered to other way and converted to tars on the way out.

All things we could do to make the bug disappear and have the wording 'compressed file/folder' make sense.