I've had a look at the documentation for mount and nfsmount, and I'm not entirely clear on which is the right choice for different applications.
Some parts of the website suggest the former uses FUSE and the latter uses NFS, but the nfsmount docs page says it also uses FUSE. I see on serve nfs's docs page that it was created for "recent macOS versions where installing FUSE is very cumbersome".
Is the difference between the two commands just about which dependencies are used? Are there backends or operating systems where one offers better performance than the other?
rclone mount and rclone nfsmount both mount a remote as a local filesystem, but they use different underlying technologies.
rclone mount uses FUSE libraries. On Linux needs fuse/fusermount (which is part of any Linux distro I know) and on macOS 3rd party tools - macFUSE (kernel extension) or FUSE-T.
rclone nfsmount uses built-in NFS server (rclone serve nfs) + native OS NFS client mount. It is identical to mounting remote NFS filesystem but everything is local. It does not require any third-party FUSE software.
In terms of performance on macOS mount with macFUSE is probably the fastest but me personally I use FUSE-T (which also uses local NFS server + mount method). The latter speed is acceptable for my needs. I have never tested performance in too much details.
Another option is to use FUSE-T in FSKit mode (real macOS native way) - see details here. macFUSE supports this method as well but last time I checked it was in early beta.
What is your exact requirement? What do you want to use mount for?
That's helpful, thank you! I'm using rclone to mount a Google Drive shared drive on Windows, and the issue I posted about last year has come back, so I went into the docs to see if I could find any options which may help. It doesn't seem like mount vs nfsmount would make a lot of difference in this case so I'll keep exploring (and maybe make a help post with some logs soon…), but that's still good to know for future. Thank you!