Re: Trouble getting archives to load as archives

[Bernardo Bacic <bernardo.bacic@pobox.com>]

it was a dark and stormy night when Kevin Rodgers said, On 07/08/2008 05:00 PM:
> Davin Pearson wrote:
>> 2008/7/5 Peter Dyballa <Peter_Dyballa@web.de>:
>>> How does it work when you invoke GNU Emacs as 'emacs -Q' or 'emacs -q' ?
>>> With -Q neither the system's nor your own customisation is loaded, 
>>> with -q
>>> your's not loaded. In either both or in one case GNU Emacs should behave
>>> correctly ...
>>
>> With -q and -Q and the following:
>>
>> (add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist
>> '("\\.\\(arc\\|zip\\|tar\\|gz\\|lzh\\|zoo\\)\\'" . archive-mode))
>>
>> Then loading a *.tar or *.gz file generates the following error messages:
>>
>> File mode specification error: (error "Buffer format not recognized") 
>> [3 times]
> 
> That's because archive-mode does not support .tar or .gz files.  From
> arc-mode.el (Emacs 22.2):

Emacs 22.1.1 started with -Q option (under GNU/Linux) opens a *.tgz file with 
no problems.
(info "(emacs) Compressed Files")

 From memory, the OP was referring to version 21.*, not sure what the 
situation is there. Perhaps adding tar and gz extensions to auto-mode-alist 
was unnecessary?