alamb commented on PR #7961: URL: https://github.com/apache/arrow-rs/pull/7961#issuecomment-3090220267
> I agree that whatever we do should not be merely physical byte comparisons... but what does logical equality even mean? As in, if two variant objects compare logically equal, what can I do with that newfound knowledge? What goes wrong if I treat two variant objects as "equal" when they are not? etc. In my mind, the biggest usecase for `eq` is unit tests -- when we want to assert that the content of two Variants is equal -- like encoding expected results from converting from JSON to variant > the variant spec defines a notion of [equivalence class](https://github.com/apache/parquet-format/blob/master/VariantEncoding.md#encoding-types) that would almost certainly consider logical equality as a "user expression": This is a good point, but I suggest we make any 'equivalence class' based comparison explicit (like `Variant::class_eq` or something when the need arises) > Short string -- The spec requires that Yes, let's do that > One could claim that two objects are the same if their field ids are the same. But that's only true if they both were encoded using the same metadata dictionary! I think this is a function of how we are defining equality -- I think I would probably try and define equality so it did not include the contents of the dictionary (aka does not rely on the actual values of the `field_ids`) -- This is an automated message from the Apache Git Service. To respond to the message, please log on to GitHub and use the URL above to go to the specific comment. To unsubscribe, e-mail: github-unsubscr...@arrow.apache.org For queries about this service, please contact Infrastructure at: us...@infra.apache.org
