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https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HADOOP-6685?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=12934566#action_12934566
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Tom White commented on HADOOP-6685:
-----------------------------------

I have two serious issues with the current patch, which I have mentioned above. 
However, given that they have not been adequately addressed I feel I have no 
option but to vote -1.

The first is that no change is needed in SequenceFile unless we want to support 
Avro, but, given that Avro data files were designed for this, and are 
multi-lingual, why change the SequenceFile format solely to support Avro? Are 
Avro data files insufficient? Note that Thrift and Protocol Buffers can be 
stored in today's SequenceFiles.

The second is that this patch adds new serializations which introduce into the 
core a new dependency on a particular version of each of Avro, Thrift, and PB, 
in a non-pluggable way.

This type of dependency is qualitatively different to other dependencies. 
Hadoop depends on log4j for instance, so if a user's code does too, then it 
needs to use the same version. A recent JIRA made it possible to specify a 
different version of log4j in the job, but this only works if the version the 
user specifies is compatible with *both* their code and the Hadoop kernel code.

However, in the case of a PB serialization, for example, the PB library is not 
used in Hadoop except in the serialization code for serializing the user's data 
type. So it's a user-level concern, and should be compiled as such - putting it 
in core Hadoop is asking for trouble in the future, since the Hadoop releases 
won't keep track with the union of PB, Thrift, and Avro releases. These 
serialization plugins should be stand alone, or at least easily re-compilable 
in a way that doesn't involve recompiling all of Hadoop, such as a contrib 
module. The user just treats the plugin JAR as another code dependency.

To move forward on this issue it's clear that compromise is needed. I actually 
prefer strings in serialization (HADOOP-6420), but am prepared to compromise 
over it, in the interests of finding consensus.


> Change the generic serialization framework API to use serialization-specific 
> bytes instead of Map<String,String> for configuration
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>                 Key: HADOOP-6685
>                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HADOOP-6685
>             Project: Hadoop Common
>          Issue Type: Improvement
>            Reporter: Owen O'Malley
>            Assignee: Owen O'Malley
>             Fix For: 0.22.0
>
>         Attachments: libthrift.jar, serial.patch, serial4.patch, 
> serial6.patch, serial7.patch, SerializationAtSummit.pdf
>
>
> Currently, the generic serialization framework uses Map<String,String> for 
> the serialization specific configuration. Since this data is really internal 
> to the specific serialization, I think we should change it to be an opaque 
> binary blob. This will simplify the interface for defining specific 
> serializations for different contexts (MAPREDUCE-1462). It will also move us 
> toward having serialized objects for Mappers, Reducers, etc (MAPREDUCE-1183).

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