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https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HADOOP-6298?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=12763841#action_12763841
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Nathan Marz commented on HADOOP-6298:
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Yes - I'm proposing solely a rename, not an API change. The behavior of the
method is exactly as it should be for performance reasons. I'm ok with leaving
out "getNonPaddedValue" and leaving it up to the user to do the copy if they
need it - this idea was just for programmer convenience but I can see how it
could be accidentally misused.
I understand that it's clearly documented - the problem is, no one looks at the
JavaDoc for these seemingly "obvious" methods. Can we at least agree that the
name is confusing? Myself and all my coworkers who have worked with Hadoop have
made this mistake.
> BytesWritable#getBytes is a bad name that leads to programming mistakes
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Key: HADOOP-6298
> URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HADOOP-6298
> Project: Hadoop Common
> Issue Type: Improvement
> Affects Versions: 0.20.1
> Reporter: Nathan Marz
>
> Pretty much everyone at Rapleaf who has worked with Hadoop has misused
> BytesWritable#getBytes at some point, not expecting the byte array to be
> padded. I think we can completely alleviate these programming mistakes by
> deprecating and renaming this method (again) to be more descriptive. I
> propose "getPaddedBytes()" or "getPaddedValue()". It would also be helpful to
> have a helper method "getNonPaddedValue()" that makes a copy into a
> non-padded byte array.
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