Add SHA-2 and journal ID in Caja list view

Development Discussion
1

Trying this one again because I lost my marbles briefly in the first thread I made about this; SHA-2 is nice for file validity, but it is a minor inconvenience for the end-user to perform steps via other GUI programs or the command line to ensure file validity.

Having Caja index every file's SHA-2 fingerprint in the current directory and show them in list view (or at least, concatenated with means to expand in a tooltip on hover) would be nice for security-conscious users of mid-tier systems with SSD media, and for legacy systems that would be impacted rather heavily by the indexing process in some instances waiting for the procedure to complete would be better than exposing a system or network to a threat from a tampered file.

Also, having the journal ID (its journal in the Ext4 and NTFS partition formats independent of its file name and path) would be very nice to have on hand for users who make physical links, as the physical file and physical links would access the same node. Enhanced file interrogation tools available by default would be nice for users like me who love to use links a whole bunch where applicable, and knowing how these links apply; being technically intimate with the link chain would not only ensure security through information, but also make sure more technical users like myself are actually using the correct files for links to function as intended.

A functional power user example of this would be search via SHA-2; copy the ID from a website using that for validity and define an SHA-2 search, to get exactly that file as a search result, should the website for that particular file have current security fingerprint information and it exists on your local filesystem within defined scope.

2

There are a lot more problems with this than might be obvious, but the easiest point is probably "where are you planning on storing this extra information?" for half a million files or more just from a user browsing around.

The second point would probably be your incorrect impression that "mid-tier systems with SSD media" wouldn't even notice this happening. caja is supposedly threaded, but trying to access a local SSD while copying files to a NAS etc causes the SSD window to not respond at all until the copy operation reaches a "sequence point", which can be well over 10s.
It would also make HDD systems either completely unusable (if done badly) or present a Windows Vista level of bad UX even if done well.

Wouldn't a caja plugin that hashes a file resolve 99% of your wishes?

3

A Caja plugin which hashes 100% of my files would probably be what I am after, but I admit the hashing process for me would be a bit of a time waster, or at least something I would need to do before I go to bed since it would probably take hours to deal with.

Maybe this will be possible in the future when another revision of Extended Journaling is released. But then we're leaving the topic of desktop software and going into talk about partitions. (Then appending this information to the file would also change the SHA-2 hash unless this new format requires software does not directly tamper with the file, instead relying solely on shortcuts as their own individual file to the file stored as a specific journal entry.)