Some time ago (yeah, I could have blogged about this. In fact, I should have…), we started using Apache Cassandra to store user sessions for our web applications. To do this, we used Tomcat-Cassandra, a drop-in replacement for the standard Tomcat Session Manager.
After a little while we stumbled upon two defects in the software, that were show-stoppers for us. It created Session objects always, even if the code used to process the request did not need a Session at all, and never evicted invalidated Sessions. I created issues #3 and #4 in their bugtracker to address each of them, respectively. Provided patches in both of them, but couldn’t wait for a new release, so we forked the project.
Not so long ago, I got a mail informing me that both of the patches were accepted. It is an enjoyable task, to upgrade a dependency and delete a whole repository of now-unneeded software.