I spent several hours over the last few days trying to get the HBaseSinnk working with https://github.com/apache/flume/pull/396 and have come to the conclusion that it is simply not possible to have that Sink be present and upgrade Hadoop. The problem is that the Hadoop upgrade requires Guava be updated and that project is not good about maintaining backward compatibility. With the newer version of Guava the HBaseSink tests fail with a NoSuchMethodError for method in HashFunction. If the HBaseSink is reverted back to the version of Hadoop and Guava it currently uses it gets a NoSuchMethodError in the Guava Preconditions class.
As far as I can tell there is no good reason to be using that version of HBase. It seems like you would only want to use it if you are using Java 7, which Flume no longer supports. Due to this I will be removing that module from the build so I can merge that PR. Users should instead use the HBase2Sink. Ralph
