General support for POSIX extended attributes (xattr)
I am new to KDE having mostly used Unity in the past, so be patient with me.....
What is the status of providing general support for POSIX extended attributes in Dolphin?
Enabling and manipulating them is trivial and user_xattr is already a default option for mount in most filesystems that support it. AFAIK it is present in (at least a minimal POSIX implementation) in almost all contemporary file systems and all Linux + BSD OS utilities.
Not related to Dolphin, I am surprised attr getfattr/setfattr not a base install. We have to apt install attr / rpm -i attr to manipulate them, when EXT4/XFS/BTRFS seem to be the ubiquitous filesystems and all have attributes on by default. Even NTFS supports something similar and WSL maps to it.
I can find mentions of this going back over almost two decades, even mentions that Konquror 'resolved' this for real money. I never used it, but was this feature actually lost in the move to Dolphin?
I can't find a mention of this topic on this issue tracker so I am raising it here and mentioning related issues.
Not sure I understand how the issue trackers work here. There seem to be two (kde/Dolphin) are unconnected? Is this a bug in the issue tracker itself?
From the KDE bug tracker https://bugs.kde.org:
-
116617 Raised in 2006 'fixed'.
'duplicates' of 224635 274327 342152 370371 370543 415473 and linked to bounty (I guess against Konquor) - 189560 Raised in 2009 and still not closed in 2021
- 388481 Related: Raised in 2018
Reading all the above I think there are three real issues but only one (being the lack of a UI) is with Dolphin. And that must be a trivial fix?
1: Some programs still don't use the correct OS methods to manipulate files so can loose or corrupt extended attributes. Surely that should not be the concern of Dolphin or KDE, after all minimal compliance is the point of POSIX.
2: KDE has somehow joined manipulating and viewing extended attributes to the act of searching so alters Dolphin behaviour depending on if Baloo is enabled or not - surely there should be no such connection from the perspective of Dolphin or any of the KIOs.
3: There are already two existing dialogs for attributes / properties, why can't (as a minimal implementation) they just be exposed in the file properties dialog and properties panel as the rest of the file properties already are? Or perhaps better there be a specific UI for attributes linked to those existing dialogs.
Footnote: I also think there is some confusion and lack of common knowledge here, so perhaps somebody needs to help people understand terms. Perhaps that is why this has been 'fixed' so many times.....
-
People are getting ACLs mixed up with attributes. (getfacl vs getfattr)
-
People are confusing the POSIX standard with abstract implementation of tags, e.g. some programs use .attributes, a related database or similar - I agree, users rightly should not see how it works in Dolphin, but it should just work.
-
People are mixing up specific usages (e.g. tags/comments etc) and file attributes e.g. on reddit and reddit and on KDE forums