CommonExtendedAttributes / xattr tags

[Felipe Barriga Richards]

Hi list,

I've been working into adding support for tagging files using extended
attributes (xattrs). My proposed place and way to store such tags will
be to store them on user.xdg.tags as a string of comma-separated values.

Currently this is being used by:
- dolphin (kde file manager)
- baloo file indexer (https://community.kde.org/Baloo)

I also have 3 patches to implement this on caja file manager and
nautilus file manager (for search and display):
- https://github.com/mate-desktop/caja-extensions/pull/23
- https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=774242
- https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=773795


The current guidelines of common extended attributes are here:
https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/CommonExtendedAttributes/

Additionally I was thinking into write a small tool to work with this
tags from command line (dump, add, delete, replace).


Related: Apple osX/macos store tags on
'com.apple.metadata:_kMDItemUserTags'
(http://superuser.com/questions/645827/how-does-maverickss-finder-store-tags).


Maybe we can start a discussion about more xattrs properties like:
- ratings
- color tags
- emblems (on another place like user.xdg.emblems or shared with the
tags). For this I think that we could create a basic list of default
emblems.
- tags should be stored sorted ?


Regards,


-- 
- fbr