On Aug 9, 2006, at 12:21 PM, Eric Baldeschwieler wrote:
Why not provide a pointer to the real record reader? Seems like a valid OO way to get access to all kinds of things.
Those attributes were put in to the JobConf so that Hadoop could re- run an isolated task, so they had to be serializable. Putting real objects into the JobConf breaks that property.
Ben hasn't explained why he wants the RecordReader, so I was trying to guess. The problem with giving out references to the RecordReader is that you are exposing the framework's implementation details. In particular, all you can really do to a record reader is advance it. That really isn't something that the Mapper should be doing.
-- Owen
