Netbeans and PHP projects over network shares

While trying to edit a bunch of existing PHP files in NetBeans, I had a little struggle getting the project set up correctly in NetBeans. There exists a project type called “PHP Application with Existing Sources”, and there exists a “Put NetBeans metadata into a separate directory”, but this latter feature does not work as I expected. If I try to set source directory to the Windows network share where my PHP scripts reside, and set metadata directory to a local directory to avoid filling the network share with metadata specific to this particular computer, NetBeans gives the error “Project and Source directories cannot be relativized”. It expects source and metadata directory to be on the same logical drive, or in the same network share.

To overcome this I created a symlink in my homedir on my server (a Linux box), pointing to the directory containing the PHP scripts. I could then set the source code folder to \\myserver\homes\mySymlink, and metadata folder to \\myserver\homes\tmp\netbeansjunk.
Hope this is useful to someone...