Minor Description
ACCUMULO-267 made this change, but I think it was the wrong way to go about it.
From the comments on ACCUMULO-267:
This is the wrong way to go about doing this fix. The reason why it took a JobContext is so that it could accept a "Job" object. This was modeled after the pattern Hadoop was using for FileOutputFormat, which is somewhat the standard for conventions in configuring MR jobs.
While JobContext does specifically state that's what it's purpose is, it is a base class, and Job extends JobContext, and includes a comment that describes it as holding the state of the job at submission time. This API should really be taking a "Job" object, rather than a "JobContext" object. Further, because Job is the only JobContext that actually works as intended here, the change from JobContext to Job does not require any deprecation, because Job will still work, and any other JobContext that isn't a Job will still fail. (We would have to deprecate the ones that were added in 1.4 that took a Configuration object, though... because those were never "correct", if we are going off of the conventions set by Hadoop's provided OutputFormats).
It is somewhat annoying to deprecate something in 1.5 that was added in 1.4... especially since it allows people to go back to what they were doing before. But, I think it might be worth it to be consistent with the established conventions, and to clarify the semantics of the methods (we are, after all, modifying the state of a job we are about to submit, and not just an arbitrary configuration, which is used for all sorts of things).