[Usability]Mounting zip, tar, iso and similar files

[Per Cederberg <per percederberg net>]

First: This is a feature suggestion for Gnome. I might have
posted it to the wrong forum, but I didn't find any appropriate
forum for general suggestions and feature improvements on the
Gnome web sites. (OTOH, what feature requests aren't related to
usability anyway?)

Background: I had a problem the other day trying to open a .zip
file on my newly installed Linux machine. After some searching on
the web I found the File Roller tool. This works nice, somewhat
like WinZip, but still... why should I have two file browsers,
when Nautilus works just fine? I like the directory tree, and
especially being able to drag-n-drop files between directories.
Having two separate windows, this is not at all as easy as it
could be (one window hiding the other, etc, etc).

Idea: Why not simply mount the zip files in the file system or
at least make the files and directories visible through Nautilus?
I suspect that extending Gnome-vfs might be one way of implementing
this, but I know too little about the details to be sure. Extending
this idea further, one would of course like to be able to mount any
"archive" of files, such as .tar.gz, tar.bz2, ISO image, etc.

Related: I've searched the web for this and came up with some
interesting related work to this. Actually, I found that some
environments already have support for this kind of operation. OS X,
for instance, allows the mounting of ISO images. The two links below
detail two environmens where it is possible to mount zip files:

http://www.vieka.com/doc/doczip.htm
http://www.hwaci.com/sw/tobe/zvfs.html

So, would this be viable for the Gnome project? Or should a feature
like this be embedded deeper into the operating system?

/Per

----
Per Cederberg
http://www.percederberg.net/