Douglas Lewan <d.lewan2000@gmail.com> writes:

Hi Doug,

> Indeed. I'd be more than happy to surrender to work to someone who can
> provide a simpler implementation. I don't happen to know GVFS or
> libarchive or the question of how to bind lisp to a C library.

Thanks for the offer. At first step, you might just try the
tramp-archive solution, and provide feedback about usability (nobody did
so far). Just open a file like "/path/to/file.cpio/", and play with
it. The point is the trailing slash. You could open even compressed
archives, like ".../file.cpio.gz/".

For knowing libarchive and binding Lisp to a C library ... all of this I
didn't know either when starting to contribute to Emacs. I've learned it
by doing, which seems the only way to do it :-)

> In the meantime, cpio-mode looks usable now for the archives it
> supports.  What remains is testing and polish. I would very much
> appreciate testing from anyone who can help with it.

I have written test/lisp/net/tramp-archive-tests.el for such
purposes. Maybe you can steal some ideas or code from there ...

And of course, you could ask me whatever you want about.

> Thanks.

Best regards, Michael.