[GitHub] incubator-spark pull request: [SPARK-1090] improvement on spark_sh...

[aarondav]

Github user aarondav commented on the pull request:

    https://github.com/apache/incubator-spark/pull/599#issuecomment-35139397
  
    That is ideal, but as Patrick mentioned in #602, we cannot do this because 
users currently depend on the behavior of SPARK_MEM. Thus we must deprecate it 
and encourage users not to use it, but still support it for existing users.
    
    This is why we have suggested creating new environment variables for 
setting the shell memory (and example memory) to avoid changing the executor 
memory without changing past behavior.