See previous comment about config file vs. command line options, regarding SPARK_HISTORY_OPTS. I'm not a big fan of that approach for daemon processes - config files are a cleaner approach here.

I can drop the "-D" since it's mostly just a convenience (avoids having to type "spark.history." before every option), or I can change its syntax to be the more "standard" -Dkey=value. Your choice.

As far as backwards compat, I tried to keep the 1.0 options intact. I'll double check it though.