This is something which could be fixed in the local backend, the file might appear as file.txt with file.txt.xattrs by the side.
What is your use case for rclone? If you are using it for backups then you might be better off using restic - you can then use rclone as a restic backend to back up to any cloud providers that rclone supports.
restic stores the attrs in binary blobs. It then uses rclone to save these blobs to a cloud provider, saving and restoring attributes and permissions.
rclone syncs files on a 1:1 basis to cloud providers so only supports operations the cloud providers support, which doesn't include extended attributes.
I was just studying Restic. It would seem that if I use Restic and Rclone, the 1:1 ratio between my original file system and the cloud would be broken. Is this accurate?
Some cloud storage providers do support xattrs (Rsync.net). Do you (or your team) have any plans to add xattr support to Rclone?
I would love to help you out. The only problem is that I don't know Go. I am at the very beginning of transferring from IT to programming, so the only languages I currently know are C and a bit of C++.