I think it makes sense to finish symlinks support in the Hadoop 2 GA release.
Colin On Mon, Sep 16, 2013 at 6:49 PM, Andrew Wang <andrew.w...@cloudera.com> wrote: > Hi all, > > I wanted to broadcast plans for putting the FileSystem symlinks work > (HADOOP-8040) into branch-2.1 for the pending Hadoop 2 GA release. I think > it's pretty important we get it in since it's not a compatible change; if > it misses the GA train, we're not going to have symlinks until the next > major release. > > However, we're still dealing with ongoing issues revealed via testing. > There's user-code out there that only handles files and directories and > will barf when given a symlink (perhaps a dangling one!). See HADOOP-9912 > for a nice example where globStatus returning symlinks broke Pig; some of > us had a conference call to talk it through, and one definite conclusion > was that this wasn't solvable in a generally compatible manner. > > There are also still some gaps in symlink support right now. For example, > the more esoteric FileSystems like WebHDFS, HttpFS, and HFTP need symlink > resolution, and tooling like the FsShell and Distcp still need to be > updated as well. > > So, there's definitely work to be done, but there are a lot of users > interested in the feature, and symlinks really should be in GA. Would > appreciate any thoughts/input on the matter. > > Thanks, > Andrew