[HBASE-9299] Generate the protobuf classes with hadoop-maven-plugin

• Type: New Feature
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 0.98.0, 0.96.0
• Hadoop Flags: Reviewed
• Release Note: Adds in reference to the hadoop-maven-plugin (commented out). Improved documentation around how to generate protobuf classes.
• Assignee: Eric Charles
• Reporter: Eric Charles
• Created: 22/Aug/13 09:54
• Updated: 20/Nov/15 11:54
• Resolved: 28/Aug/13 18:16

Description

For now, the protobuf classes are generated once by a dev, and put in src/main/resouce.

This allows the other dev to not have the correct protoc version available on their machine. However, when a dev wants to modify the protoc messages, he has to know how to generate the classes. This could be documented...

Another approach would be to put a harder requirement on the hbase developers (protoc available) and let the hadoop-maven-plugin (http://central.maven.org/maven2/org/apache/hadoop/hadoop-maven-plugins/2.0.5-alpha) to do the work (I have bad experience with other maven protobuf plugins, the hadoop one works just out of the box).

I don't think asking to install protoc to build hbase is so difficult, but that's an additional step between the dev and the artifcat.

The advantage would be to allow to have different protobuf versions for different hbase distributions (perfectly possible but quite theorical).

So
option 1: We are happy to keep the classes in src/main/java
option 2: We want to move to hadoop-maven-plugin
option 3: I may be short of idea... any other input?