Hadoop MapReduce InputFormat Deprecated?
Although Hadoop still uses things from the mapred package internally, from the user's perspective, they should pretty much all be considered deprecated. Hadoop is extremely lacking when it comes to documentation and their examples all tend to be outdated. Luckily, when you're really stuck there's always stackoverflow
From the documentation:
Deprecated Interfaces
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org.apache.hadoop.mapred.InputFormat
Use InputFormat instead.
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Due to the weird deprecation behavior with 0.20.2 and even weirder suggestion to use an implementation after deprecating an interface, I dug a little deeper. This interface is still present in 0.21.0, with the deprecation tag removed. I couldn't find a comparable interface in the trunk at the time of this writing.