CMake Build from NFS Mount on Windows (Cygwin)

Context

When your multiplatform code (Qt i.e.) needs to be build from Linux and Windows and your code resides on a Linux file server.

On the Windows machine Cygwin is installed and git from it is used by CMake to download thirdparty libraries.

There are 2 options available for Windows to access this resources: * Samba * NFS

For some reason a 'Samba' gets its uid and gid wrong which git has some problems with the download thirdparty libraries. NFS has no such problem.

Install NFS

NFS needs to be manually installed on a Windows system.

# For Server
Install-WindowsFeature NFS-Client
# For Workstation
Enable-WindowsOptionalFeature -FeatureName ServicesForNFS-ClientOnly, ClientForNFS-Infrastructure -Online -NoRestart

Mounting NFS

An NFS mount can only be performed on a drive not a directory. So in order to mount a directory a symbolic link is needed using mklink command. The mklink command needs to be enabled for regular users.

Find the nfs exports using the showmount

showmount -e server-name-or-ip

Mount the NFS to the S: drive.

mount -o anon server-name-or-ip:/path/to/directory S:

Create a symbolic link in the Cygwin users home directory.

mklink /D %HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH%\cygwin\source S:\

Note

Deleting a symlink in Windows is done using rmdir and not del which is confusing because in Linux a >symbolic link is considered a file and not a directory.