apache/incubator-spark — pull request #57 by aarondav (2013-10-13 01:17:13+00:00)
Title: Refactor BlockId into an actual type

Converts all of our BlockId strings into actual BlockId types. Here are some advantages of doing this now:

+ Type safety
+ Code clarity - it's now obvious what the key of a shuffle or rdd block is, for instance. Additionally, appearing in tuple/map type signatures is a big readability bonus. A Seq[(String, BlockStatus)] is not very clear. Further, we can now use more Scala features, like matching on BlockId types.
+ Explicit usage - we can now formally tell where various BlockIds are being used (without doing string searches); this makes updating current BlockIds a much clearer process, and compiler-supported.
(I'm looking at you, shuffle file consolidation.)
+ It will only get harder to make this change as time goes on.

Downside is, of course, that this is a very invasive change touching a lot of different files, which will inevitably lead to merge conflicts for many.