As far as I can see, all the functionality it provides can be provided by hive cli with some configuration. There is functionality like -g and -p option which it has, for which if there are users can be added to hive cli. So, it seems we can get rid of HCatCli.java and its friends as well as bin/hcat If dev folks think positively about this we can ask on user list to see how users feel about it.
Thanks, Ashutosh
