Hive is not required - as long as commons-http is in there, you should be fine.
I'm not aware of any easy way to propagate a change like this across the cluster in HDP. I expect it to be there as typically distros have this available in their UI.
Do note that you should be able to add commons-http as part of your job (whether it's mapreduce or tez) if you add it to your Hive script (see the docs). This becomes Hive specific and should work across various distros/versions.