On Oct 31, 2011, at 1:45 PM, Eli Collins wrote: > On Mon, Oct 31, 2011 at 9:27 AM, Charles Baker <cba...@sdl.com> wrote: >> But even >> if it did return the relative path, it seems counter-intuitive to me. I agree >> with Daryn and expect the behavior of getFileLinkStatus() to return the >> symlink as is and not presume that I wanted it qualified. If I wanted a >> qualified path for a symlink, I would expect to call Path.makeQualified() to >> do so. > > It does this because getFileStatus always returns fully qualified > paths in HDFS, and we don't make to make callers check the type and > care about the method that was used to obtain the FileStatus, eg to > know whether it contains a fully qualified path or not. > > I think the original rationale for while FileStatus objects always > have fully qualified paths is so they can be passed around w/o callers > having to do future work to access them ie didn't want to disassociate > the path from the file system it exists on. Note that in Hadoop > "Paths" are actually URIs, vs file system paths (a subset of URIs). > > Regardless of the rationale, changing getFileStatus to return objects > w/o fully qualified paths would break compatibility with a lot of > existing programs. It would also hinder people porting to FileContext > which tries to be consistent with FileSystem. > > Would a new method on FileStatus or Path that returns the unqualified > version of the path (ie w/o the scheme and authority, and w/o > resolving relative paths relative to the FileContext) work? Ie the > FileStatus could return the contents of the HdfsFileStatus w/o making > it fully qualified.
Off the top of my head: If we can't change the FileStatus behavior, I think FsShell would be well served by a Path#getRawUri() method that returned the exact uri/string used to instantiate it. As long as FileStatus preserves the path it's given, I think it would work well. The various Path ctors would need to be modified to update the rawUri by tacking on directory components, or removing them. I don't suppose it'd be ok for Path#toString() to return the stringified raw uri? :) Daryn
