I wasn't previously added to the dev mailing list, so I'd like to post my discussion with Andrew Schofield below for visibility and further discussion:
Hi Andrew, Thanks for the reply. The main concern with this approach would be its backward compatibility. I’ve highlighted the thoughts around the backwards compatibility of the initial approach, please let me know what you think. Thanks, Aakash ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Hi, By adding a new method to the SinkContext interface in say Kafka 2.6, a connector that calls it would require a Kafka 2.6 connect runtime. I don't quite see how that's a backward compatibility problem. It's just that new connectors need the latest interface. I might not quite be understanding, but I think it would be fine. Thanks, Andrew ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Hi Andrew, I apologize for the way the reply was sent. I just subscribed to the dev mailing list so it should be resolved now. You are correct, new connectors would simply require the latest interface. However, we want to remove that requirement - in other words, we want to allow the possibility that someone wants the latest connector/to upgrade to the latest version, but deploys it on an older version of AK. Basically, we don't want to enforce the necessity of upgrading AK to get the latest interface. In the current approach, there would be no issue of deploying a new connector on an older version of AK, as the Connect framework would simply not invoke the new method. Please let me know what you think and if I need to clarify anything. Thanks, Aakash
