Deprecate but keep strings-as-blob support for now for compatibility sake
Merge branch 'cassandra-1.2' into trunk
Remove deprecated strings-as-blob for trunk
make local copies of compaction thresholds so they can't be changed out from under us mid-method
patch by jbellis for CASSANDRA-5214
Merge branch 'cassandra-1.2' into trunk
Correctly expire gossip states for edge cases.
Patch by yangwei, reviewed by brandonwilliams for CASSANDRA-5216
Merge branch 'cassandra-1.2' into trunk
Correctly expire gossip states for edge cases.
Patch by yangwei, reviewed by brandonwilliams for CASSANDRA-5216
Merge branch 'cassandra-1.2' into trunk

Conflicts:
	CHANGES.txt
avoid no-op caching of byte[] on commitlog append
patch by jbellis; reviewed by yukim for CASSANDRA-5199
merge from 1.2
whitespace
avoid serializing to byte[] on commitlog append
patch by jbellis; reviewed by yukim for CASSANDRA-5199
Merge branch 'cassandra-1.2' into trunk
add dsnitch comments
Merge branch 'cassandra-1.2' into trunk
cqlsh tracing: ninja-remove quotes around session_id
Merge branch 'cassandra-1.2' into trunk
Improve handling of directory creation failures

patch by Aleksey Yeschenko; reviewed by Brandon Williams for
CASSANDRA-5196
Merge branch 'cassandra-1.2' into trunk