I've had a few different new-to-Accumulo contributors recently run into the issue of Rat failing the build after changing branches.
I know we already have a warning about this[1], but AFAICT it's over the threshold for consumable information. Even after pointing people to the warning, the existing workaround tripped up atleast one of them. Despite the warning about using "git clean," the destruction of their local IDE changes were surprising. For contributions to Accumulo that aren't coming from committers, the Rat plugin seems much more likely to give a false positive than to catch an error. Additionally, whatever committer is reviewing the contribution should be checking for license compliance anyways. In the interests of reducing the surprise for new contributors, I'd like to move our use of Rat to a profile that is only default enabled during a release run. The profile would still let those who want rat to run on every build to enable it and we could update the guide for handling new contributions to say committers should enable the rat profile to help guard against errors. Any objections? [1]: http://accumulo.apache.org/source.html#running-a-build -- Sean
