Hello, this is my first post here.
I think as long the CLI-3rd-party-tools for successful and persistent tagging (how it actually should be) are open source, one could relative easily add either some GUI to them or (as I’d prefer much more) “convert”/rewrite one of those tools f.e. into a plugin for Dolphin.
Btw. it’s only some related topic, but I am sure most if not all of you know as well that “commenting” files brings exactly the same problems with it. At least if you do it the same way (in Dolphin + usual file handling like copying, moving, etc.) as it were tags.
If I got it right, the bug(s) were submitted certain time ago and most of you are waiting. Or maybe some of you are looking for some personal or “universal” workaround. Unfortunately I have absolutely no clue of the API provided by KDE - or should I rather speak of that which comes with Dolphin?
A spontaneous idea for an ugly / quick’n’dirty workaround (sorry for using pseudocode):
1. Select some directory with a hand full of files you want to add different tags.
2. Tag them resp. add those new tags to "the list"; stay in the directory, keep the window/terminal open.
Did I get it right that tags are (meant to be) saved “in” each file’s attributes (creation/modification/access times, permissions, owners, etc.) or at least related, not separable from those (attributes)? By changing (w/o intention even) some attributes, the tags get lost (probable the comments as well in this step). Not only “the table” of “what was tagged”, but even the manually created tags too. If that’s (almost) correct:
3.1. The actual workaround...could be f.e. via a daemon ("tagfixd", "metad", whatever) to read-out all tags/comments/metadata. Thus it automatically gets some tags that were created prior using them. In our case, he gets everything at once because it's just one directory.
3.2. If not via some daemon, then maybe by registering (on login or so) certain callbacks? Don't know if this can be implemented w/o causing pain in the ass, but if you can f.e. make our script or program for "safe tagging" to check each open directory for accessed files -> "do they have new tags/metadata"? If yes and not listed in the taggedfiles-table (depending on the present data types / structures of the language used of course; if a list fits better than a map, set, dictionary, whatever - "table" is meant in a very broad sense here.
4. Now tags and affected files should be safe/saved. Depending on whether you take the approach with a daemon or the one which operates with callbacks (f.e. on moving, copying, deleting any file as well as on adding/changing tags of any file resp. renaming/deleting some tag itself as a whole.
I hope that didn’t sound hyper-naîve or somehow idiotic - I am working during the last few years to 90% either in Lua 5.1, Python 3 or Bash and despite my basic knowledge of languages (f.e. C/++, Java) surely used much more frequently in..well, serious, big and time/efficiency-critical applications, whole (desktop) environments resp. their provided APIs - unfortunately I haven’t studied a single line of code of “KDE” neither it’s single components.
What do you say? That idea came spontaneously to my mind after reading this thread and now I am getting even excited to write something similar at least for myself (after reading the API one would need in such case of course)…I just hope that there are possibilities “in KDE’s source code / used lang.” to export some functions to Lua or even better, Python (if not it may get too hard for me cee-pee-pee’ing around at the moment)…
