Hi Jim,
You can link to that gist on GeoMesa, no problem. I will continue to update that gist as more information grows. Perhaps it's worth moving it to a markdown file in a repository so that others can edit it as well?
I think the biggest challenge was getting joda-time fixed in the pom.xml files. Forcing joda-time-2.3 to be included as a dependency in the output JARs such that it is also loaded first in each runtime (accumulo iterators, hadoop mapreduce) (via relocations directive?) seems to be pretty important. Less challenging was linking against the CDH hadoop version and including their repository for it.
Another step that could be improved in the POM files would be to include maven enforcer requiring JDK 1.7.
I don't know a good strategy for multiple targets with maven, but I guess the best thing would probably be to use maven profiles and then include wrapper build scripts for the various target platforms. I suppose you don't actually need a proper CDH build-machine to link against CDH versions of hadoop, so that might make the release process for CDH / Acc1.6 builds easier.
Side note: My zookeepers are definitely over-powered. I'm moving them to smaller machines today, and will update my gist for those.
As far as GeoMesa swag goes, I'm all set for now! A cool idea in the future might be branded keychain compasses?
Cheers,
Mike Atlas