Re: [found the culprit]

[Yuri Khan <yurivkhan@gmail.com>]

On Sat, Nov 17, 2018 at 6:02 AM Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> wrote:

> I do not see how to support packing an archive in Dired, because I do
> not see a clean and simple way to specify which files to put in it.

In the majority of the actual use cases, one wants to pack one or more
files or subdirectories located in the current directory, with
directories packed recursively with all their contents. The natural UI
to that is “optionally mark everything you want packed, type a key,
enter the archive name”. If no items are marked, pack the file or
directory at point.

A more involved scenario is that one has a tree where some files
should and others should not go into the archive. Any other file
manager would be hard-pressed to support this efficiently, but Dired
has the ‘dired-maybe-insert-subdir’ feature (bound to ‘i’ by default)
that expands a subdirectory in the same buffer. So one could expand as
many subdirectories as are necessary to make the selection, set marks,
and invoke the archiving command, which would pack the files keeping
the relative directory structure.

An even more involved case is where one has a tree and wants to pack
its files into a different directory structure. Most command-line
archivers do not even provide for that case, so Dired needn’t either.