checksum: new command or api function to generate file hashes?

[jorgeorpinel]

Extreacted from #3102 (comment)

💡 Maybe a DVC command to generate DVC checksums from arbitrary files could be useful in these or other situations, basically exposing our internal function that does this (which I know is based on MD5 but not always exactly that).

Not sure how useful this would be since dvc commit can recalculate checksums when DVC-files are edited manually.

[efiop]

@jorgeorpinel We've heard such requests previously, but they were all solved by the introduction of dvc commit. Wouldn't consider implementing this unless there are users with real use cases. 🙂

[jorgeorpinel]

Makes sense!