[HADOOP-6298] BytesWritable#getBytes is a bad name that leads to programming mistakes

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Affects Version/s: 0.20.1
• Fix Version/s: 0.22.0
• Hadoop Flags: Reviewed
• Assignee: Owen O'Malley
• Reporter: Nathan Marz
• Created: 07/Oct/09 22:01
• Updated: 12/Dec/11 06:19
• Resolved: 16/Dec/10 17:44

Description

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.