As you probably saw, late last week I created a tag for a rc2 for HCatalog 0.4.0. However, I want to wait before rolling the release candidate. Last week a furor erupted on the incubator general list as to whether release artifacts could have _any_ binary files (including jars) in them at all, with some authoritative voices arguing that they could not. You can see the thread here http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-general/201203.mbox/%3CCAOFYJNY%3DEjVHrWVvAedR3OKwCv-BkTaCbEu0ufp7OZR_gpCTiA%40mail.gmail.com%3E if you've missed it. The outcome of that discussion is not clear to me, but I think our next release candidate will have a better chance of approval in the IPMC if there are no jars in it. We can remove the HCatalog jars from our release, but unfortunately the Hive code we wrap also contains jars.
The good news is that we are already working towards splitting out HCatalog from Hive, both in terms of the source code and releases. It seems to me the best course is to quickly finish that work in the next fews days and incorporate that in 0.4 before rolling another release candidate. This will realize our goal of getting HCatalog to no longer extern Hive and make our releases easier. The exact proposal is: I'm working on a patch to remove hive/extern from our source tree and use maven to fetch Hive instead. I hope to post that later today. Giri is working on a patch to to remove Hive code from the HCat distribution tarball. He should post that soon. Giri is also working on a patch to Bigtop to do rpms for HCatalog. As part of this we'll drop the rpm target from our build.xml. This work should also be done in the next few days. Once the first two items are done, I'll roll another release candidate. Thoughts? Alan.
