How do we package Cassandra SE ? How to the solve the dependencies?
The engine requires Thrift libraries to be present.

There are no packages for Thrift. Because of that we cannot expect package managers to pull in thrift as a dependency automatically.

That's why, we will build with thrift statically. For this to work, thrift should be build as

./configure --enable-shared=no --enable-static=yes CXXFLAGS=-fPIC CFLAGS=-fPIC

We will distribute the Cassandra SE as a separate package (RPM/DEB). This package will, probably, contain only two files: ha_cassandra.so and /etc/my.cnf.d/cassandra.cnf with

[mariadb]

plugin-load-add=ha_cassandra.so

And the storage/cassandra/CMakeLists.txt has to determine whether thrift libraries are installed, and enable or disable the engine accordingly (at the moment, it disables the engine unless it was enabled explicitly - this check should be removed).

When everything is done, the KB page Building Cassandra Storage Engine for packaging needs to be updated to match the reality.