I'm assuming is for performance reasons and a tradeoff against complicating
some use-cases with collections if done differently.
However as Cell and CellComparator is part of the API it also get's used in
collections and the implicit expectation is that it will compare the value as
well (I.e. This has potential for some interesting bugs... Yes I got bitten by
it :)).
Also this doesn't even get mentioned in Cell.equals(Cell, Cell) javadoc and the
only mention is in KeyValue.equals ("Needed doing 'contains' on List. Only
compares the key portion, not the value.").
I saw CellUtil.matchingValue and Result.compareResults could potentially be
used, however I'm trying to understand the full context.
I looked over https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HBASE-4676 and
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HBASE-7162 which seem to introduce the
comparison code, but I couldn't find something explicit so I thought that this
may have older origins.
Thanks,
Cosmin
