(+Impala's podling mentors for advice) On 26 May 2016 at 08:57, Jim Apple <[email protected]> wrote:
> > I think we probably need to make a firm decision about whether we're > going > > to try to support non-toolchain builds. In the past we've said that it > would > > be nice to allow building Impala with system libraries (even if we don't > put > > special effort into supporting it), but I don't think we've committed to > the > > idea, or committed to toolchain builds only. > > > > If we're going to support non-toolchain builds we would need some kind of > > testing to prevent it breaking all the time. > > > > It would be nice to have, but I'm not sure anyone has the > time/motivation to > > do it. What do people think? > > I agree that it would be nice to support non-toolchain builds, and I > agree that we don't have the time for this right now. > > I would call this a lower priority than most of the other ASF infra > transition work. > Is it (or will it be) possible to build Impala without downloading source or binary packages from Cloudera's managed S3 bucket? Is the situation different at all for link-time dependencies compared to system tools like gcc? Both of these are managed through the toolchain. My concern is that people might balk at being forced to use compiler binaries from a non-ASF source, and that if they want to at least verify for themselves that the compiler binaries are built from a clean source tarball they have to rebuild the toolchain themselves, which takes hours. Looking at this from the perspective of a fresh user it's not very user-friendly to say you can't use the system compiler that you already have installed from a trusted source. However, if it's easy to override the compiler location in the toolchain, that point is moot. We should ask the podling mentors for guidance once the technical details are clear.
