I have an issue here that needs to upgrade commons-collections[1] (this is an example), but PR ci fails because flink-python test cases depend on flink-sql-connector-kafka, but kafka-sql-connector is a small jar, does not include this dependency, so flink ci cause exception[2]. Current my solution is [3]. But even if this PR is done, the upgrade of flink still requires kafka-connector released.
This issue leads to deeper problems. Although the connectors have been externalized, many UTs of flink-python depend on these connectors, and a basic agreement of externalized connectors is that other dependencies cannot be introduced explicitly, which means the externalized connectors use dependencies inherited from flink. In this way, when flink main upgrades some dependencies, it is easy to fail when executing flink-python test cases，because flink no longer has this class, and the connector does not contain it. It's circular problem. Unless, the connector self-consistently includes all dependencies, which is uncontrollable. (only a few connectors include all jars in shade phase) In short, the current flink-python module's dependencies on the connector leads to an incomplete process of externalization and decoupling, which will lead to circular dependencies when flink upgrade or change some dependencies. I don't know if I made it clear. I hope to get everyone's opinions on what better solutions we should adopt for similar problems in the future. [1] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FLINK-30274 [2] https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/11287509/250120404-d12b60f4-7ff3-457e-a2c4-8cd415bb5ca2.png https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/11287509/250120522-6b096a4f-83f0-4287-b7ad-d46b9371de4c.png [3] https://github.com/apache/flink-connector-kafka/pull/38 Best Regards, Ran Tao https://github.com/chucheng92
