We are in the process of figuring out avro usage in a streaming/queue world.
As I understand avro aliases they are typically used by *reader* schemas to rename fields. (I.e., reader can expect "first-name" string and use an alias "firts-name" to deal with old writer's that had it mispelled in the original writer schema.) However we would like to not have to update reader code to deal with new writers. It seems that (old) readers could look at the new writer-defined aliases and leverage them for forward compatibility. Concrete example: my old schema expects "firts-name"; my new schema fixes this by introducing "first-name" with the "firts-name" as an alias. Instead of being obligated to update my old reader, couldn't it notice this alias and *invert* the aliasing as it reads the data? Is there a fundamental reason that this isn't part of the avro java impl, or spec documentation?
