It's partially related to this issue: oras-project/oras-go#644. We should possibly follow what they decide to do and then mimic it here.

When I use "oras pull" it doesn't unpack the tgz automatically so I thought it was just an issue with the py library.
Looking at the pull function, could we add an argument like "skip_unpack= kwargs.get("skip_unpack", false)" and then check the value of that variable here
if layer["mediaType"] == oras.defaults.default_blob_dir_media_type:

Yes absolutely - I think that's the direction the upstream client will go to. Would you care to do a pull request? We can add the argument, and ensure that:

1. Documentation for usage is added
2. A test
3. Update the CHANGELOG.md and version.py

Thank you!