Major Description
The examples in examples/bin create subdirectories (either work or mahout-work) in that directory and write to those subdirectories. This works fine if the current user has write access to examples/bin, but if not (such as in the case of the package generated by Bigtop, in which the files are installed to /usr/lib/mahout and owned by root), the examples can't run. This is causing BIGTOP-96, but needs to be fixed in Mahout. The patch I'm attaching changes all the references to work, examples/bin/work, and mahout-work to instead use /tmp/mahout-work-${USER}, which will be writeable.