[cdh-user] Symbolic links re-enablement

We are currently blocked on an issue and was wondering if anyone from cloudera would be able to advise us.

I am using CDH 5.2 VM and when I try to use the FileContext.createSymlink() I get an UnSupportedOperationException.

From the 5.3 release notes, I see that Symbolic links has been temporarily disabled. ( HADOOP-10020 )

Can anyone from Cloudera please advise us if there are plans to reenable this feature shortly again ? We need this feature for managing our new datawarehouse which is being built using Impala and we are blocked in our design implementation because of this.

Thanks for your time on this. 

Proper symlink support (across FileContext and FileSystem APIs) is on
the eventual roadmap but there's no ETA on when it will arrive. There
are several eco-system projects out there that'd be affected if you
were to use symlinks today, cause they wouldn't be able to resolve it
due to lack of proper framework support, which is why it was disabled.

I'd recommend taking an alternative design approach for your task,
than to wait for or to re-enable and make use of partial symlinks
support at this point.

Thanks Harsh.

I pretty much got a similar response from the hdfs-dev community mailing list just a few moments back.

I did not get one part of your response though. What did you mean by "make use of partial symlinks support at this point." . Any pointers as to what you meant by partial support ?

Thanks for your time.