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https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/PIG-1440?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=12876076#action_12876076
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Olga Natkovich commented on PIG-1440:
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I think it is important t preserve backward compatibility in 0.8.0 to improve
adoption. Our users in Yahoo had to go through a lot of pain to migrate their
code to 0.7.0 and forcing user updates on every release is not a good idea in
my oppinion.
That being said, is it possible to achieve this without breaking comptaibility.
Can we add enum side-by-side with the old constants and depricate them for now?
The other question is - are the benefits of this change worth the effort of
refactoring. The code that uses the current constants is everywhere. The other
question is the conversion cost on performance.
> Refactor org.apache.pig.data.DataType to use Enums instead of integer
> constants
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Key: PIG-1440
> URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/PIG-1440
> Project: Pig
> Issue Type: Improvement
> Reporter: Gianmarco De Francisci Morales
> Priority: Minor
>
> Refactoring DataType to use Enums instead of integer constants would provide
> many benefits, including:
> * Cleaner code
> * Easier to iterate over Enums
> * Easier to add new Enums without braking backwards compatibility
> * Can use EnumMaps for easily link values to Enums
> * Better support for translation from Enums to Strings and viceversa
> Int (or byte in Pig's case) Enum pattern has several drawbacks as summarized
> here http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/guide/language/enums.html
> Drawbacks:
> We have to explicitly convert Enum values to bytes when serializing. This can
> be done in DataReaderWriter.
> Possibly higher overhead than simply using bytes.
> Refactoring might be difficult.
> Thoughts?
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