Yesterday I cleaned out old Spark releases from the mirror system -- we're supposed to only keep the latest release from active branches out on mirrors. (All releases are available from the Apache archive site.)
Having done so I realized quickly that the HiveExternalCatalogVersionsSuite relies on the versions it downloads being available from mirrors. It has been flaky, as sometimes mirrors are unreliable. I think now it will not work for any versions except 2.3.1, 2.2.2, 2.1.3. Because we do need to clean those releases out of the mirrors soon anyway, and because they're flaky sometimes, I propose adding logic to the test to fall back on downloading from the Apache archive site. ... and I'll do that right away to unblock HiveExternalCatalogVersionsSuite runs. I think it needs to be backported to other branches as they will still be testing against potentially non-current Spark releases. Sean
