Hi all, I would like to suggest that we consider ending the support for some of the older Flink versions. The main reasons are as follows:
1. Currently, the minimum supported version is Flink-1.14. But Flink releases like 1.14 and 1.15 have been out of date for a long time, and some important features (speculative execution, AQE, etc.) of Flink batch are missing. 2. The Flink community currently does not support versions lower than 1.18, considering that Flink 1.20 will be the first LTS version, the existing 1.x users will gradually upgrade to 1.20 also. 3. There is a big difference between the shuffle API of the old version and the current Flink code base, and it is tedious to maintain compatibility. Moreover, new features such as JM Failover and hybrid shuffle cannot be supported in out-of-dated Flink release. If users do have a need to adapt older Flink versions, it's not difficult for them to do it themselves, but this can reduce our maintenance burden. For now, communities such as Apache Iceberg have taken a more radical strategy that in line with Flink's official supported version. We don't have to go that far yet, but it feels like at least we can remove the versions 1.14 and 1.15 for now. Best regards, Weijie
