HMerge Status

[Austin Heyne]

We're currently sitting at a very high number of regions due to an 
initially poor value for hbase.regionserver.regionSplitLimit and would 
like to reign in our region count. Additionally, we have a 
spatio-temporal key structure and our region pre-splitting was done 
evenly, without regard to the spatial distribution of our data and thus 
have a lot of small and empty regions we'd like to clean up. I've found 
the HMerge class [1], and it seems it would do something reasonable for 
our used case. However, it's marked as Private and doesn't seem to be 
used anywhere so I thought I'd ask if anyone knows the status of this 
class and how safe it is.

Thanks,
Austin
[1] 
https://github.com/apache/hbase/blob/branch-1.4/hbase-server/src/main/java/org/apache/hadoop/hbase/util/HMerge.java