(To be clear: I'm not a cassandra developer, nor have I yet used Cassandra in a real production setting - though I'm hoping to...)
> I'm curious what others think: My estimation is that Cassandra is not a "apt-get install and forget" type of software yet. If you're going to use cassandra, you are most likely going to want to spend some serious time reading up on it and carefully configure, monitor and operate it. For that reason, I think the benefit of getting cassandra into Debian stable or Ubuntu is of limited importance to users with a serious need. However, it *is* extremely practical to have software in nicely packaged form. I would like to suggest that if packaging is do be a higher priority for Cassandra, that it might be more useful to provide pre-built .deb packages (possibly in the form of an apt repository) that people can add to the sources.list. Combine that with clear instructions on pinning (in the latter case of apt repositories) and users have a very convenient way of installing and upgrading Cassandra. At the same time, the Cassandra developers would save, I suspect, significant effort involved in trying to remain long-term compatible and giving support to users running very old releases who cannot legitimately be told "upgrade to the latest version" after having been fed Cassandra from e.g. Debian stable. In contrast, remaining compatible with Debian stable (i.e., building .deb:s for new versions of Cassandra on old versions of Debian/Ubuntu) is likely not a big deal at all given the lack of native dependencies; it also means that you need not solve, as a pre-requisite, things like the lack of a separately packaged thrift or other dependencies. In short, I would suggest something as along the above lines as an easer-to-accomplish goal for the Cassandra developers, yet providing high payoff to users. -- / Peter Schuller
