I actually think hadoop-core putting their packaging into core is the
wrong place; there end up being a lot of cyclic links against the
mapreduce and hdfs parts, though that's being corrected through SVN
changes.
Ideally the package releases should be downstream of the source
projects, so anyone can build a complete stack as {rpm,deb} from the
versions -though that requires the complete tar being published locally
to the m2/ivy repository (which is how we do it)
The functional testing can be isolated from the package/deploy so that
you can run things like terasort against a full deployment.
