As succinctly as I can: 1. Replication-related IT have been flakey for a long time, 2. The feature is not actively maintained (critical, or at least, untriaged issues exist dating back to 2014 in JIRA), 3. No volunteers have stepped up thus far to maintain them and make them reliable or to develop/maintain replication, 4. I don't have time to fix the flakey ITs, and don't have interest or use case for maintaining the feature, 5. The IT breakages interfere with build testing on CI servers and for releases.
Therefore: A. I want to @Ignore the flakey ITs, so they don't keep interfering with test builds, B. We can re-enable the ITs if/when a volunteer contributes reliability fixes for them, C. If nobody steps up, we should have a separate conversation about possibly phasing out the feature and what that would look like. The conversation I suggest in "C" is a bit premature right now. I'm starting with this email to see if any volunteers want to step up. Even if somebody steps up immediately, they may not have a fix immediately. So, if there's no objections, I'm going to disable the flakey tests soon by adding the '@Ignore' JUnit annotation until a fix is contributed, so they don't keep getting in the way of troubleshooting other build-related issues. We already know they are flakey... the constant failures aren't telling us anything new, so the tests aren't useful as is.
