[File Managers Integration] Keeping checksums persistently.

[malick-2892]

Hello Tristan and Co.
I have a suggestion of enhancement / new feature. This is pertaining browsing file properties via file manager of your choice. One can generate set of digests easily but those are "temporary". Once you close the property window hashes go into oblivion. You could use .crc files to store checksums which was my first thought, but keeping digest/checksums along with the file itself (where possible) could be even more handy. That's in extended attributes (xattr). This is linux systems we're talking after all, and most of the standard filesystems support extended attributes. I've been going through convoluted proces of generating checksums via gtkhash and than sticking those to the target with a command in shell. Since your properties tab support generating hashes it would be welcome to store those as well.
Hope you find this idea interested and useful. I couldn't be the only one finding such feature most handy.

[tristanheaven]

Interesting idea to store the digests in xattrs. I'll look into it.

It might make sense to use an existing format if there are other tools which do the same thing.

[tristanheaven]

Confirmed glib g_file_set_attribute() could be used to do this without adding any OS-specific dependency. It doesn't seem to support saving binary data though. That means some space would be wasted in encoding to remove nul bytes.

[malick-2892]

I find that viable solution, and since xattr(7) takes plain text as input /output any base hex digest should fall under this condition no problem, I reckon. Thank you for your interest Tristan! I appreciate!