On May 13, 2015, at 5:02 AM, Alan Burlison <alan.burli...@oracle.com> wrote:
> The current version of Protocol Buffers is 2.6.1 but the current version
> required by Hadoop is 2.5.0. Is there any reason for this, or should I log a
> JIRA to get it updated?
The story of protocol buffers is part of a shameful past where Hadoop
trusted Google. This was a terrible mistake, based upon the last time the
project upgraded. 2.4->2.5 required some source level, non-backward
compatible, and completely-avoidable-but-G-made-us-do-it-anyway surgery to make
work. This also ended up being a flag day for every single developer who not
only worked with Hadoop but all of the downstream projects as well. Big
disaster.
The fact that when Google shut down Google Code, they didn't even tag
previous releases in the github source tree without significant amount of
pressure from the open source community was just adding insult to injury. As a
result, I believe the collective opinion is to just flat out avoid adding any
more Google bits into the system.
See also: guava, which suffers from the same shortsightedness.
At some point, we'll either upgrade, switch to a different protocol
serialization format, or fork protobuf.
