rclone: build: bazil.org/fuse no longer supports macOS

Alas the maintainer of the fuse library that rclone uses for rclone mount is dropping support for macOS. I updated the library and it no longer builds on macOS.

https://github.com/bazil/fuse/issues/224

This isn’t a disaster - rclone has 2 other supported mount libraries on macOS.

mount2
cmount

They both have pros and cons though.

mount2

mount2 is relatively new and untested. It is supported on macOS but it isn’t supported on FreeBSD so we can’t drop the mount library completely. It would be easy to make this the default mount on macOS.

cmount

cmount uses libfuse directly via its C interface. It works well but requires building rclone with CGO.

A naive build of rclone on macOS with CGO will mean that rclone won’t run without the OSXFUSE library installed. Need to check this is actually the case as it might be dynamically loaded like cgofuse does on windows.

Investigations show that it is quite difficult to build go binaries on macOS that are static - this is discouraged by Apple, so what we need is a partially static binary which has libfuse compiled in but is still a dynamic library.

Another alternative would be to provide 2 binaries for macOS one which supports mount and one which doesn’t. This is undesireable!

If we can build rclone with the correct library statically then it might be a good idea to use cmount for all platforms.

About this issue

Original URL
State: closed
Created 4 years ago
Comments: 53 (39 by maintainers)

Commits related to this issue

vendor: roll back bazil.org/fuse to the last version which supports macOS #4393 Roll back the bazil.org/fuse update to give us some time to explore alternatives for macOS. See upstream issue: https:... — committed to rclone/rclone by ncw 4 years ago
vendor: Update github.com/billziss-gh/cgofuse@master #4393 — committed to rclone/rclone by ncw 4 years ago
build: enable cmount on macOS #4393 — committed to rclone/rclone by ncw 4 years ago
cmount: fix macOS losing directory contents #4393 Before this change when reading directories we would use the directory handle and the Readdir(-1) call on the directory handle. This worked fine for ... — committed to rclone/rclone by ncw 4 years ago
vendor: roll back bazil.org/fuse to the last version which supports macOS #4393 Roll back the bazil.org/fuse update to give us some time to explore alternatives for macOS. See upstream issue: https:... — committed to negative0/rclone by ncw 4 years ago
vendor: Update github.com/billziss-gh/cgofuse to v1.4.0 #4393 — committed to rclone/rclone by ncw 4 years ago
build: enable cmount on macOS #4393 — committed to rclone/rclone by ncw 4 years ago
cmount: fix macOS losing directory contents #4393 Before this change when reading directories we would use the directory handle and the Readdir(-1) call on the directory handle. This worked fine for ... — committed to rclone/rclone by ncw 4 years ago
mount: warn macOS users that mount implementation is changing #4393 — committed to rclone/rclone by ncw 4 years ago
mount: disable bazil/fuse based mount on macOS #4393 The library is no longer supported on macOS. — committed to rclone/rclone by ncw 4 years ago
mount: make mount be cmount under macOS #4393 This also adds an alias to the mount command so it responds as `rclone cmount` as well as `rclone mount`. — committed to rclone/rclone by ncw 4 years ago
mount: disable bazil/fuse based mount on macOS #4393 The library is no longer supported on macOS. — committed to rclone/rclone by ncw 4 years ago
mount: make mount be cmount under macOS #4393 This also adds an alias to the mount command so it responds as `rclone cmount` as well as `rclone mount`. — committed to rclone/rclone by ncw 4 years ago
rclone: build with 'cmount' support 'rclone cmount' provides the same functionality as 'rclone mount'. They both provide FUSE integration, but 'cmount' is backed by libfuse while 'mount' is backed by... — committed to midchildan/nixpkgs by midchildan 3 years ago

Most upvoted comments

I have merged the changes to use cgofuse to master now 😃

The plan will be

for v1.53 (DONE)

compile in rclone cmount/cgofuse for macOS users unconditionally
warn that rclone mount will be using rclone cmount to nudge people to try it before v1.54 and report problems while they still have a way back

for v1.54

remove rclone mount for macOS and make its implementation be rclone cmount provided there haven’t been problems we can’t fix.

ncw on Jul 24, 2020

FWIW anacrolix/fuse now also supports FUSE-T.

anacrolix on Aug 2, 2023

An alternative to cgofuse is to use @anacrolix’s own fork of bazil/fuse, which is a drop-in replacement (no code changes necessary) which provides the exact same functionality — plus working macFUSE 4+ support.

You can get it from here: https://github.com/anacrolix/fuse

GwynethLlewelyn on Jul 30, 2023

This has been merged in brew, so any future installs or upgrades from brew should have the cmount command.

darthShadow on Oct 3, 2020

FYI I have released cgofuse v1.4.0.

billziss-gh on Jul 24, 2020

Your “it all fits in my head” comment is so spot on. Many other programming languages that keep adding features miss that very important point.

Coming from many years of C# and having discovered Go only recently, I can totally relate to that 😄

Anyway… I gave a try on both my Mac:

the one with OSXFUSE installed works perfectly as before (both mount and cmount)
the one without OSXFUSE runs fine until I try to mount (as expected) but we would probably want to catch the panic 🤔

Minnie rclone-v1.52.2-198-g5a59983e-fix-4393-cmount-beta-osx-amd64 % ./rclone mount dropbox: ~/rclone
2020/07/04 16:33:25 Fatal error: failed to mount FUSE fs: cannot locate OSXFUSE
Minnie rclone-v1.52.2-198-g5a59983e-fix-4393-cmount-beta-osx-amd64 % ./rclone cmount dropbox: ~/rclone
panic: cgofuse: cannot find FUSE

goroutine 53 [running]:
github.com/rclone/rclone/vendor/github.com/billziss-gh/cgofuse/fuse.(*FileSystemHost).Mount(0xc000a94200, 0x7ffeefbffa99, 0x16, 0xc0001d1e00, 0x10, 0x14, 0xc0001eb700)
	github.com/rclone/rclone/vendor/github.com/billziss-gh/cgofuse/fuse/host.go:610 +0x792
github.com/rclone/rclone/cmd/cmount.mount.func1(0xc000a94200, 0x7ffeefbffa99, 0x16, 0xc0001d1e00, 0x10, 0x14, 0x5b64ee0, 0xc0000c8fc0, 0xc00010f3e0)
	github.com/rclone/rclone/cmd/cmount/mount.go:168 +0x6d
created by github.com/rclone/rclone/cmd/cmount.mount
	github.com/rclone/rclone/cmd/cmount/mount.go:166 +0x436

creativeprojects on Jul 4, 2020

I find Go a very productive language for me. It all fits in my head (like C) so usually just keeps out my way.

Your “it all fits in my head” comment is so spot on. Many other programming languages that keep adding features miss that very important point.

billziss-gh on Jul 4, 2020