Hi all, Forking this thread as requested by Vinod. To help anyone who's catching up with this thread, I've written up a wiki page containing what I think are the proposals under discussion. I did my very best to make this as fact-based and disinterested as possible; I really appreciate the constructive discussion we've had so far. If you believe you have a proposal pending, please feel free to edit the wiki.
https://wiki.apache.org/hadoop/MovingToJdk7and8 I think based on our current compatibility guidelines, Proposal A is the most attractive. We're pretty hamstrung by the requirement to keep the classpath the same, which would be solved by either OSGI or shading our deps (but that's a different discussion). Thanks, Andrew