[ARROW-13141] [C++][Python] HadoopFileSystem: automatically set CLASSPATH based on HADOOP_HOME env variable?

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 6.0.0
• Component/s: C++, Python
• Labels: filesystem hdfs pull-request-available
• External issue URL: https://github.com/apache/arrow/issues/18719
• Assignee: Joris Van den Bossche
• Reporter: Joris Van den Bossche
• Created: 22/Jun/21 09:28
• Updated: 11/Jan/23 08:31
• Resolved: 13/Oct/21 21:43

Description

In the "legacy" python-specific HadoopFileSystem implementation, we have a _maybe_set_hadoop_classpath function which has some logic to set the CLASSPATH environment variable based on HADOOP_HOME or the hadoop executable: https://github.com/apache/arrow/blob/c43fab3d621bedef15470a1be43570be2026af20/python/pyarrow/hdfs.py#L134-L149

This is also mentioned in the documentation of the new HadoopFileSystem (https://arrow.apache.org/docs/python/filesystems.html#hadoop-file-system-hdfs ):

> If CLASSPATH is not set, then it will be set automatically if the hadoop executable is in your system path, or if HADOOP_HOME is set.

However, this sentence was probably simply copied over from the docs about the legacy filesystem. And for the new HadoopFileSystem implementation, we don't have this logic to automatically set up CLASSPATH.

Do we want to add this logic to the new implementation as well? (in cython, or actually in C++?) Or if not, we should update the docs to clarify that CLASSPATH is actually required.

cc apitrou

Issue Links

• links to: GitHub Pull Request #10592