Github user sershe commented on the issue:
https://github.com/apache/orc/pull/222
Updated the JIRA with motivation.
I will rename the flag; there isn't a better way primarily because of the
TODOs you are asking me to remove - we don't have access to information about
errors if the user and the return-er of the codec are two different pieces of
code at different times.
There's also no good way to check the state of the codec to see if it's
valid or not. Hadoop ZLib codec may just throw NPE in reset when it's invalid,
so the "Safely" catch block will handle that case. However it's nice to give
user an opportunity to be proactive about this, esp. in the case of the
get-use-return usage pattern
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