Archive Mounter cannot mount single-file archives like .bz2

[Endolith]

Binary package hint: nautilus

The Archive Mounter should support single-file archives like .bz2 or .gz. The mount point should just be a dummy folder with the single file inside.

[Alex Lourie (alourie)]

Endolith

Could you please explain a bit more on this? Why the current state, which is opening the archive, is not good enough?

[Endolith (endolith)]

I'm not sure what you mean by "opening the archive". Archive Mounter does not show up in the context menu for these files, and if you try to make it work through "Open with Other Application", it does nothing, as far as I can tell.

Opening a .tar.bz2 immediately creates a mount point on the desktop. Opening a .bz2 through the custom command menu does nothing.

[A. Walton (awalton)]

"Opening a .tar.bz2 immediately creates a mount point on the desktop.
Opening a .bz2 through the custom command menu does nothing."

And this makes absolute sense. TAR stands for "Tape ARchive". In this case, the archive is then compressed using bzip. Bzip2 is a compression algorithm.

The Archive mounter mounts (compressed or uncompressed) archives.
The Archive mounter does not "mount" arbitrary compressed files.

[Endolith (endolith)]

It should be able to mount arbitrary compressed files. That's why I filed this bug.

[A. Walton (awalton)]

Archives are mountable because they represent a (albeit ill-defined) file system: they have numerous files, often directory structures, sometimes even volumes in the case of ISOs, etc. Compressed files are just that: files that have been compressed. They aren't file systems by any stretch. They're just files.

I understand the need for a GUI tool to work with it and compress/decompress it, but the Archive Mounter is the wrong tool for that.

[Endolith (endolith)]

So an archive with a single file in it should be handled with an entirely different tool than an archive with multiple files in it?

[Endolith (endolith)]

In other words, libarchive may only support "proper archives", but from a user's perspective, .bz2 is an archive format, too.

Wikipedia's article, for instance, differentiates between "Archiving only", "Compression only", and "Archiving and compression" formats, but they're all under the umbrella of "Archive formats", as the term is usually used. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_archive_formats

A .bz2 file can be opened from the context menu with "Archive Manager", just like a .tar.bz2. I think it should correspondingly be mountable from the context menu with "Archive Mounter".