FLUME-1487 was committed which changes the internal format of the FileChannel to protocol buffers. So compiling requires protoc. This is a pretty easy build and the source is available here: http://code.google.com/p/protobuf/
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FLUME-1487 Brock -- Apache MRUnit - Unit testing MapReduce - http://incubator.apache.org/mrunit/
