Extended file attributes with Dolphin over NFS (Linux)

Hello, my dear young friends!

I personally find the assignment of extended file attributes (xattr) via the Dolphin file manager very useful. Adding a few keywords and a short description often saves me from having to open the folders to read the attached “sidecar” files. Even though Dolphin currently only provides three of these attributes for the user, this is much more convenient and enormously clearer than writing and reading these attributes the traditional way via the command line.

At the latest with NFSv4 it is possible to write extended file attributes if the underlying file system supports it. So there is no difference to the local file system except for the intermediate layer NFS.

The file manager Dolphin completely disables the visibility of extended file attributes as soon as it accesses file systems mounted via NFSv4. However, the probability that there is a file system with support for extended file attributes behind NFSv4 is indisputably high (ext2 was already able to handle this).

To my surprise, assigning extended file attributes is even possible with the Gwenview image viewer over the network:
#+begin_src sh
getfattr -d Bildschirmfoto.png
user.baloo.rating=“8”
user.xdg.comment=“A test with Gwenview, xattr entered directly via NFS.”
user.xdg.tags=“NFSv4,Gwenview”
#+end_src

In addition, the users of Dolphin might think that already assigned attributes have been lost. After all, Dolphin is the file manager for users who do not want their extended attributes to be lost when copying or moving files.

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I recommend to post feature requests / bug reports to the KDE Bugtracker: https://bugs.kde.org/
They tend to get lost in Forums.

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