Spark 1.2.1 has a bug that blocks any JavaSerializer without a work around. It requires the SparkConf to get a path to a jar that exists on all nodes.
So I’ve updated to 1.1.1 and if you want to run on 1.2+ just change the parent pom but the item similarity stuff won’t run without the work around. Ping me if needed. For me the build seems to complete every time now due, I suspect, to a test suite fix in PR #74 Mahout spark-shell works on 1.1.1 and 1.2.1
