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Comment by lxgr | Hacker News Reader

File Providers are useful in some scenarios, but they are also not really a FUSE equivalent.

They're more geared towards Dropbox-like synchronizing use cases. Some developers have made it work for SSHFS too, but even that's already a bit of a stretch; for more custom solutions it definitely falls short: https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/681325

The only option currently seems to be to implement a network file server such as SMB (which is what Google Drive used to do before File Providers existed!) or NFS, for which there even is a FUSE bridge available: https://github.com/macos-fuse-t/fuse-t

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It's unfortunate that fuse-t follows the same closed source model as MacFUSE did. It's really holding things back.

I was hopeful that Ganesha NFS [1] would suffice as a bridge for the various FUSE filesystems I need to use with macOS, but alas, they have abandoned the FUSE interface and moved to FSAL/FSAL_VFS [2].

It would be really nice to have a clear path to building a copy of Ganesha NFS that supported a whole host of the great FUSE filesystems out there built to this API.

[1] https://github.com/nfs-ganesha/nfs-ganesha [2] https://github.com/nfs-ganesha/nfs-ganesha/issues/759

Watch out for for the Mac SMB client. I found a bug in several MacOS versions which causes the SMB client to send an incorrect file handle in some file requests, causing random files to be deleted which are unrelated to the files you're operating on: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37345855

If you've ever had a suspicion about files on an SMB share going missing, occasionally, when there's been a Mac client using the share, this does indeed happen.

I honestly worry Apple will remember NFS exists at some point and delete that too. File Providers is so limiting.

Me too – I actually only found out it was still around (and not just around, but even supporting v4!) when I looked at fuse-t as an alternative to macFUSE.

That's a scary thought, I depend on mounting NFSv4 files systems. I'm not sure SMB is a replacement, almost certainly wouldn't be as performant [on 10/100 GbE networks].

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