Details
Trivial Description
RandomSeedGenerator has following code:
FileSystem fs = FileSystem.get(output.toUri(), conf);
...
fs.getFileStatus(input).isDir()
If specify output path correctly and input path not correctly, Mahout throws not well understandable error message. "Exception in thread "main" java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: This file system object (hdfs://172.31.41.65:9000) does not support access to the request path 's3://by.kslisenko.bigdata/stackovweflow-small/out_new/sparse/tfidf-vectors' You possibly called FileSystem.get(conf) when you should have called FileSystem.get(uri, conf) to obtain a file system supporting your path"
This happens because FileSystem object was created from output path, and getFileStatus has parameter for input path. This caused misunderstanding when try to understand what error message means.
To prevent this misunderstanding, I propose to improve error message adding following details:
1. Specify which filesystem type used (DistributedFileSystem, NativeS3FileSystem, etc. using fs.getClass().getName())
2. Then specify which path can not be processed correctly.
This can be done by validation utility which can be applied to many places in Mahout. When we use Mahout we need to specify many paths and we also can use many types of file systems: local for debugging, distributed on Hadoop, and s3 on Amazon. In this case better error messages can save much time.