One thing that people (at least I) tend to do is use environment variables when running standalone jobs:

    SPARK_MEM=X SPARK_CLASSPATH=Y scala ./my.spark.job

This line implies that these should only be used in the context of a spark-env.sh file. So are we just deprecating this approach?

This also reminds me it would be nice to have a doc that covers how to run a real production standalone job. Including things like how to deal with dependencies and the recommended way for setting these types of configuration options.