I see that the next HBase 2.5 RC is imminent, and before that's set in stone, I wanted to bring up the question of whether there will be official HBase 2.5 binaries built with the Hadoop 3 profile and available in the usual Maven repositories. (In addition to the usual Hadoop 2 profile binaries)
The HBase 2.x line has a commitment to maintain support for Hadoop 2.x, but Hadoop 3.3 is the current stable Hadoop line and the most recent release notes [1] encourage all users of Hadoop 2.x to upgrade to Hadoop 3. Without convenience artifacts built against Hadoop 3, no end-users with Hadoop 3 clusters will be able to use the Apache-distributed binaries and will instead have to recompile HBase from source themselves, or use a 3rd party distribution that does so for them. This is especially inconvenient for downstream projects such as Apache Phoenix, which has never officially supported the HBase 2.x / Hadoop 2.10 combination. (It currently supports only HBase 2.3 or 2.4 with Hadoop 3. HBase 2.5 support will be added very shortly after its release as part of Phoenix 5.2.) To even run the Phoenix IT tests locally requires contributors to download the HBase source release and manually mvn install to their local maven repo using the Hadoop 3 profile, to avoid crashes in the HBase minicluster.[2] This is a barrier to new contributors and confuses even veteran ones, and has to be done again for every new HBase release. In general, I expect the Hadoop 3 user base to grow and the Hadoop 2.10 user base to shrink with every future HBase 2 release, so I think this is a worthwhile improvement. Thanks, Geoffrey [1] https://hadoop.apache.org/release/3.3.4.html [2] https://github.com/apache/phoenix/blob/master/BUILDING.md
