Hmm...last email was blocked from the list as spam :) Let me try again forcing plain text:
Hey Jed, I think what you are looking for is something I have proposed, but is not implemented yet. We started with a fairly simple collections API since we just wanted to make sure we had something in 4.0. I would like it to be better though. My proposal was that when you create a new collection with n shards and z replicas, that should be recorded in ZooKeeper by the Overseer. The Overseer should then watch for when a new node comes up - then a trigger a process that compares the config for the collection against the real world - and remove or add based on that info. I don't think it's that difficult to do, but given a lot of other things we are working on, and the worry of destabilizing anything before the 4 release, I think it's more likely to come in a point release later. It's not super complicated work, but there are some tricky corner cases I think. - Mark
