I was wondering why the *BufferShallowCopy methods in CellUtil were marked as @Deprecated and moved into PrivateCellUtil. I understand the general motivation (hiding internal-only methods), but these methods don't expose any internals or break abstractions, and they're helpful for handling Cell data without having to copy it.
Alternatively, *BufferShallowCopy methods could be added to Cell, mirroring Result.getValueAsByteBuffer, but it's an interface, so this would be messy for implementing classes. My specific reason for asking is that Protobuf's Java parsers have parseFrom methods that accept either byte arrays, ByteStrings (a Protobuf class), InputStreams, or ByteBuffers. Having a convenience method that wraps the cell byte array makes it easy to parse the protobuf object without having to copy bytes.
