Impala community, For years now, Impala has utilized tarballs built by Cloudera and uploaded to S3 for running most of the Hadoop components in the testing minicluster. The one exception to this is Kudu, which is instead provided by the toolchain.
This was never ideal - native-toolchain makes more sense for libraries where we want to build against a fairly static version, but Kudu is under active development and we'd like to always build against a relatively up-to-date version. As a result, patches just bumping the version of Kudu make up a significant portion of the commit history of native-toolchain. Thanks to work I'm currently doing at Cloudera, there will soon be snapshot tarballs of Kudu getting uploaded to S3 along with the other Hadoop components. I would like to propose that Impala switch to using those instead of the toolchain Kudu. One problem here is that the new Kudu tarballs will not be getting build for Ubuntu 14.04, only 16.04, but we still officially say we support development on 14.04. One option here would be to maintain the toolchain Kudu for now and hide downloading of the new tarballs behind a flag. We could also postpone some of this work until 14.04 is less common. Or, given that the bootstrap_development script already only supports 16.04, we might want to just drop support for building on 14.04. Thoughts?
