Ticket for reference: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-17896
Context: "We should expose a system env (-D) param to advanced operators to have the ability to specify the replace_addresses_token to be used during host replacement in cases where Gossip gets into a bad state." My question for the dev list: *should* we expose this parameter and functionality even if it's heavily documented as being highly unsafe and a big foot gun? Clusters can get into states where you effectively can't bootstrap a replacement without nuking it and starting over and manually intervening / twiddling with peers tables, which this allows us to work around a bit more gracefully as operators, but if you do this the wrong way it opens up a world of hurt. Given CEP-21 is on the horizon (https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/CASSANDRA/CEP-21%3A+Transactional+Cluster+Metadata) I'm leaning towards closing this out as Won't Fix but leaving the branch linked in the event someone runs into this and wants to hotfix it into a local build or something; I'm assuming CEP-21 will land before the next major which would make this redundant. What does everyone else think? ~Josh
