Michael,

First: Oh, my! I've been reading about a missing cpio mode in the emacs
TODO file for years, I'd sort of assumed that there was little work on it.
(I do admit that when I'd last joined this list, I did receive a few
attempts to start such a project.)

Your work sounds similar to mine. Indeed, my goal is to write something
like a dired front end to all the cpio formats, with relatively easy
extensibility to others. This should include editing, adding and deleting
archive members. That's turned out to be a little more than I was
expecting. Once I started looking more closely, dired is much larger that I
was expecting.

FYI The design is coarsely given in this diagram.

;; +----------------------+   +-------------+   +-------------+
;; | Format specific code |   |             |   |             |
;; | +---------------+    |   |             |   |             |
;; | | cpio-bin      |    |   |             |   |             |
;; | | +--------------+   |   |    CPIO     |   | dired-like  |
;; | +-|cpio-crc      |   |<->|    Logic    |<->|     UI      |
;; |   | +-------------+  |   |             |   |             |
;; |   +-| hpbin       |  |   |             |   |             |
;; |     | +------------+ |   |             |   |             |
;; |     +-| ···        | |   |             |   |             |
;; |       +------------+ |   |             |   |             |
;; +----------------------+   +-------------+   +-------------+
;;             Λ                     Λ                 Λ
;;             |                     |                 |
;;             V                     V                 V
;; +----------------------------------------------------------+
;; | generic code                                             |
;; |          +------------+ +--------------+ +-----+         |
;; |          | cpio-modes | | cpio-generic | | ··· |         |
;; |          +------------+ +--------------+ +-----+         |
;; +----------------------------------------------------------+

Could you point me to your code? Thanks.


On Fri, Feb 2, 2018 at 8:48 AM, Michael Albinus <michael.albinus@gmx.de>
wrote:

> Douglas Lewan <d.lewan2000@gmail.com> writes:
>
> > All,
>
> Hi Doug,
>
> > Two or three years ago I joined this mailing list and announced that I
> > wanted to write a cpio mode for emacs.
> >
> > Well, after various surprising events and mishaps I'm back, and expect
> > to have something worth showing soon.
>
> Time passes, and I have committed tramp-archive.el to Emacs' master
> branch, which supports also cpio archives (read-only for now). See
> <http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2017-12/msg00263.html>.
>
> Could you pls compare this with your work?
>
> > Thanks.
>
> Best regards, Michael.
>



-- 
,Doug
Douglas Lewan
(908) 720-7908
What one programmer can do in one month, two programmers can do in two
months. -- Fred Brooks