Today, certain bootstrap properties are set and read via system
properties. This action-at-distance way of managing these properties is
rather confusing, and completely unnecessary. But another problem exists
with setting these as system properties. Namely, these system properties
are interpreted as Elasticsearch settings, not all of which are
registered. This leads to Elasticsearch failing to startup if any of
these special properties are set. Instead, these properties should be
kept as local as possible, and passed around as method parameters where
needed. This eliminates the action-at-distance way of handling these
properties, and eliminates the need to register these non-setting
properties. This commit does exactly that.
Additionally, today we use the "-D" command line flag to set the
properties, but this is confusing because "-D" is a special flag to the
JVM for setting system properties. This creates confusion because some
"-D" properties should be passed via arguments to the JVM (so via
ES_JAVA_OPTS), and some should be passed as arguments to
Elasticsearch. This commit changes the "-D" flag for Elasticsearch
settings to "-E".
Clinton Gormley
Jason Tedor