Hey everyone, I'm starting this thread to discuss clarifying in the REST Spec on what servers should do if as part of a commit operation they receive an update <https://github.com/apache/iceberg/blob/main/open-api/rest-catalog-open-api.yaml#L2570C5-L2570C16> or requirement <https://github.com/apache/iceberg/blob/main/open-api/rest-catalog-open-api.yaml#L2601> that is unknown.
What I am proposing is to clearly say in the spec that if a server receives an update or requirement which is unknown it must fail with a 400 error code. 400 seems the most appropriate code to be able to describe unknown input in the commit table request. Here's the PR https://github.com/apache/iceberg/pull/10848/files This is a simple way to ensure that implementations avoid correctness issues that come from ignoring unknown updates/requirements. It also enables the community to be able to add new operations without any complex versioning schemes. A more concrete example: Recently there's been work on removing inactive partition specs <https://github.com/apache/iceberg/pull/10755>from table metadata. With this proposal, any server which receives a RemovePartitionSpecUpdate and does not recognize it, must fail with a 400. Note: I will propose the specific example of RemovePartitionSpecUpdate spec change in a different thread. Thanks, Amogh Jahagirdar
