Hello, I am doing a Java prototype where the publisher converts Protobuf objects into Avro records to send to a stream, then the consumer deserializes them back into Protobuf objects. The Protobuf schemas on the publisher and consumer are the "source of truth" schemas, and I use "Schema schema = ProtobufData.get().getSchema(MyProtobufClass.class);" to get the corresponding Avro schema to convert back and forth. However, one problem I encountered is: the Avro schema resulted from this method does not have a default value for repeated (array) Protobuf fields. This is causing compatibility issues for me: if I update the consumer schema first by adding a new repeated Protobuf field, the generated Avro schema cannot handle old messages without this field, as it does not have a default value to fill in for the new array field. I can probably work around this by traversing the Avro Schema object and add a default value for all the array fields, but this feels a bit clumsy.
Is there a better way to do this? Also, what's the reason behind having no default values for array field? (Am I going into compatibility edge cases by forcing default values on array fields?) Thank you
