But still ;) I'm unhappy by the fact that we always pull in parquet as a dependency.

Can we do the following: Keep the Parquet testcase for the Hadoop Compat (then, you only need to load the parquet deps if you are testing Stratosphere. But we will not ship the parquet binaries).
Move the Parquet example into the https://github.com/stratosphere/stratosphere-artifacts repository (by opening a pull request there)
Just make a folder such as `stratosphere-parquet-example`.
That would be great!