This is an unfortunately invasive change which 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.
Since this touches a lot of files, it'd be best to either get this patch
in quickly or throw it on the ground to avoid too many secondary merge conflicts.
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