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Date: Tue, 31 Oct 2006 04:47:12 -0800
From: Brian Dessent <brian AT dessent DOT net>
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Subject: Re: free NFS client for Cygwin and/or support for FUSE?
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Ben Wing wrote:

> Is there a free NFS client anyone can recommend that works will with Cygwin?

Not that I know of.  A google search turns up a couple of free
demo/trial versions of products.

> Also, has anyone considered building something like FUSE into Cygwin?
> ...
> The result would be Cygwin-specific, i.e. wouldn't work in non-Cygwin
> utilities, but that's OK; the benefit of having such a system would be
> so great that it would vastly outdo the trouble of not being able to use
> non-Cygwin utils.

No doubt that many have *considered* it, but nobody has done it (to my
knowledge at least.)

If you do it right and make it a real filesystem driver, then you both
need the expertise and time to code and test a NT kernel module, and you
have to deal with the posix-to-Windows path+permissions+ownership
translation headaches (i.e. the polar opposite of what cygwin1.dll deals
with now) since it will be visible to all Windows apps.  Both of these
put it vastly outside the scope of the Cygwin project, which is just a
regular user-mode library.

If you do it entirely in Cygwin then as you said it's only available to
Cygwin apps, which sounds fine at first but I think you will find that
for many people this is a dealbreaker.  And in order to get any patches
of this kind accepted by Cygwin maintainers you'd need to show clear
evidence that the presence of all this extra code did not affect
performance of the standard filesystem access and path translation. 
That part of the code tends to be somewhat of a sore spot, due to the
fact that it is already complex and easy to break, and a critical path
performance-wise.

Brian

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