Hi rrada, While I see your point, I am not sure how well/easy it would be support existing CDH installation across major upgrades of an OS. In other words, say you were running CDH4 on Debian 6 (Squeeze) and wanted to upgrade to Debian 7 (wheezy) without upgrading CDH or changing anything about existing CDH install. Since, we provide integration with the underlying operating system (e.g. providing deb/rpm packages, init scripts, defaults file, alternatives for configuration files, setting log file and pid file location under appropriate OS locations), we rely heavily on Operating System conventions. Some times these conventions change across major OS upgrades, e.g. /var/run is tmpfs on newer OSs. Due to changes like that and lack of guarantees that various OSs provide across major version upgrades, I don't think you can expect your existing installation to work. Moreover, our binary artifacts are different for different OSs so you will have to remove and upgrade your CDH artifacts regardless, you can preserve the data though by doing upgrades one or a few nodes at a time. So, upgrading OS across major versions is a cumbersome process which involves removing and reinstalling CDH packages/parcels for the newer OS version. At that point, if you install a newer version of CDH or the same is probably just equally the same amount of work. Please let me know if you think otherwise. Thanks!
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