apache/spark — pull request #398 by pwendell (2014-04-13 07:28:44+00:00)
Title: SPARK-1480: Clean up use of classloaders

The Spark codebase is a bit fast-and-loose when accessing classloaders and this has caused a few bugs to surface in master.

This patch defines some utility methods for accessing classloaders. This makes the intention when accessing a classloader much more explicit in the code and fixes a few cases where the wrong one was chosen.

case (a) -> We want the classloader that loaded Spark
case (b) -> We want the context class loader, or if not present, we want (a)

This patch provides a better fix for SPARK-1403 (https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SPARK-1403) than the current work around, which it reverts. It also fixes a previously unreported bug that the `./spark-submit` script did not work for running with `local` master. It didn't work because the executor classloader did not properly delegate to the context class loader (if it is defined) and in local mode the context class loader is set by the `./spark-submit` script. A unit test is added for that case.