Hi all, I wanted to broadcast plans for putting the FileSystem symlinks work (HADOOP-8040) into branch-2.1 for the pending Hadoop 2 GA release. I think it's pretty important we get it in since it's not a compatible change; if it misses the GA train, we're not going to have symlinks until the next major release.
However, we're still dealing with ongoing issues revealed via testing. There's user-code out there that only handles files and directories and will barf when given a symlink (perhaps a dangling one!). See HADOOP-9912 for a nice example where globStatus returning symlinks broke Pig; some of us had a conference call to talk it through, and one definite conclusion was that this wasn't solvable in a generally compatible manner. There are also still some gaps in symlink support right now. For example, the more esoteric FileSystems like WebHDFS, HttpFS, and HFTP need symlink resolution, and tooling like the FsShell and Distcp still need to be updated as well. So, there's definitely work to be done, but there are a lot of users interested in the feature, and symlinks really should be in GA. Would appreciate any thoughts/input on the matter. Thanks, Andrew
