Hi folks, I would like to open a discussion on how we can make HBase work well with a supported/released version of Hadoop. HBase currently ships with a hadoop jar and that hadoop jar is from hadoop 0.20 + a set of ten/twenty patches. Most of these patches are focussed on HDFS append support in hadoop 0.20. These cannot be ported back to the 0.20 branch without affecting stability of the hadoop 0.20 branch. On the other hand, it is premature for hbase deployments to use hadoop 0.21 because hadoop 0.21 is still under testing and will take some time to stabilize.
My proposal is to create a new branch off the hadoop 0.20 branch and name it branch-0.20-hbase. It will have support for append/sync and will be API compatible with the hadoop 0.20 branch. However, this branch will be marked "experimental" and API compatibility is subject to change. This branch will contain all of hdfs/mapreduce/core. If the community likes this idea, I will volunteer myself to be the release manager for this new branch and will propose a formal vote. comments/feedback/questions are most welcome. dhruba -- Connect to me at http://www.facebook.com/dhruba
