Bug#829078: elasticsearch: service does not start (java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError)

[Apollon Oikonomopoulos]

Package: elasticsearch
Version: 1.7.5-1
Severity: grave
Justification: renders package unusable

Dear Maintainer,

Elasticsearch fails to start on a clean environment. After setting 
START_DAEMON=true in /etc/default/elasticsearch. Startup fails because 
of a missing class exception. The following log was obtained by removing -b
from start-stop-daemon in the initscript:

 Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/elasticsearch/common/jackson/dataformat/yaml/snakeyaml/error/YAMLException
         at org.elasticsearch.common.jackson.dataformat.yaml.YAMLFactory._createParser(YAMLFactory.java:426)
         at org.elasticsearch.common.jackson.dataformat.yaml.YAMLFactory.createParser(YAMLFactory.java:327)
         at org.elasticsearch.common.xcontent.yaml.YamlXContent.createParser(YamlXContent.java:90)
         at org.elasticsearch.common.settings.loader.XContentSettingsLoader.load(XContentSettingsLoader.java:45)
         at org.elasticsearch.common.settings.loader.YamlSettingsLoader.load(YamlSettingsLoader.java:46)
         at org.elasticsearch.common.settings.ImmutableSettings$Builder.loadFromStream(ImmutableSettings.java:982)
         at org.elasticsearch.common.settings.ImmutableSettings$Builder.loadFromUrl(ImmutableSettings.java:969)
         at org.elasticsearch.node.internal.InternalSettingsPreparer.prepareSettings(InternalSettingsPreparer.java:95)
         at org.elasticsearch.bootstrap.Bootstrap.initialSettings(Bootstrap.java:144)
         at org.elasticsearch.bootstrap.Bootstrap.main(Bootstrap.java:215)
         at org.elasticsearch.bootstrap.Elasticsearch.main(Elasticsearch.java:32)
 Caused by: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: org.elasticsearch.common.jackson.dataformat.yaml.snakeyaml.error.YAMLException
         at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(URLClassLoader.java:381)
         at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:424)
         at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Launcher.java:331)
         at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:357)
         ... 11 more

Regards,
Apollon

-- System Information:
Debian Release: stretch/sid
  APT prefers unstable-debug
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable-debug'), (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable'), (90, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386, mips

Kernel: Linux 4.5.0-2-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=el_GR.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=el_GR.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)

Versions of packages elasticsearch depends on:
ii  adduser                                          3.114
ii  default-jre-headless [java6-runtime-headless]    2:1.8-57
ii  java-wrappers                                    0.1.28
ii  libelasticsearch1.7-java                         1.7.5-1
ii  openjdk-8-jre-headless [java6-runtime-headless]  8u91-b14-2

elasticsearch recommends no packages.

elasticsearch suggests no packages.

-- Configuration Files:
/etc/default/elasticsearch changed [not included]
/etc/init.d/elasticsearch changed [not included]

-- no debconf information