During the last community sync (30/07), we discussed the current state of the File Format API proposal [1] and found that implementing the writers for Positional Deletes where the actual row data is provided would complicate things quite a bit.
The current Iceberg V2 spec [2] defines two types of position delete files: 1. Files that store only the file name and row position. 2. Files that also store the deleted row data. The 1st type of the position deletes are widely used. The 2nd type of deletes is defined in the spec and some tests exist in the Iceberg codebase, but we’re not aware of any actual implementation using the second type (position delete files with row data). Supporting writing V2 tables via the new File Format API would be simpler if we dropped support for this feature. I would like to hear of any uses of these delete files. If we can not find use-cases, then *I propose to deprecate position delete files with embedded row data starting from Iceberg 2.0.* Thanks, Peter [1] - https://lists.apache.org/thread/ovyh52m2b6c1hrg4fhw3rx92bzr793n2 [2] - Position Delete File Spec: https://iceberg.apache.org/spec/?h=delete#position-delete-files
