Github user srowen commented on the pull request:
https://github.com/apache/incubator-spark/pull/573#issuecomment-34623406
A few thoughts on this issue -- I don't know if these lead to a solution --
Is it necessary to guard this block of code with a check to see if log4j is
being used at all? the log4j-over-slf4j shim has a no-op implementation of
PropertyConfigurator, so callers that swap out log4j for the shim will see this
code do nothing.
Or, it would be nice to just set the config file with the system property
`-Dlog4j.configuration=...` It's not great to make people specify this on the
command line. It could be set programmatically at this point in the code,
although I don't know if it's "too late" then.
Or, what about packaging the file in the default location/name of
`/log4j.properties` in the artifacts? It doesn't have effect unless you use
log4j. We would be clobbering other copies of this file from other third-party
libs, but that's either not a problem, or, something Maven can help us with by
merging the files. I know the mojo for that if necessary.
