Browse RPM and CPIO archives in Emacs with archive-mode

Have you ever tried opening a tarball or a zip file in Emacs? You will have noticed that it shows you a list of all the files in the archive, and you can open the individual files. Then perhaps you tried opening an RPM file, hoping to see something similar, only to be faced with a wall of binary data.

This pair of Emacs Lisp modules attempts to remediate that, giving you the same experience with RPM files as with tarballs and other archive files.

(Why two modules? As it turns out, RPM files consist of a bunch of metadata prepended to a compressed CPIO archive, so it makes sense to implement handling of CPIO archives, and then do RPMs on top of that.)

To install these modules, type M-x package-install-file, and select the directory containing archive-rpm.el and archive-cpio.el (don't select one of the modules themselves!). After that, any RPM files you open should display as some metadata plus a file listing.