hudson and failing contrib tests

[Michael Stack <st...@duboce.net>]

Just a note to apologize for all of the patch and nightly build failures 
in hbase of late.  Making hbase run smooth up on hudson is our #1 priority.

Many of the failings are hard to explain and not reproducible locally 
but often, when we persist, we'll find a bug that our idiosyncratic 
friend, Mr. Hudson, has managed to uncover.  Other times, we're plain 
stumped especially when a test that has been running faultless for weeks 
of a sudden ups and fails.  If we can't figure why a test fails and it 
does so repeatedly, we've recently taken to giving the test a sabbatical.

We develop on mac os x and windows.  We'll test patches as-per-process 
on these platforms and on linux before passing them to our man from 
Upstairs, Downstairs.  We have even spent time recently trying to 
replicate the Hudson environment locally installing sunos on a 
single-cpu running builds under high load but to no avail; it wouldn't 
fail the way Hudson does.

Thanks for your patience,

Yours,
The Hbase crew