Hey Matthias, Yeah I agree, I'm not against change as a general thing! I also think if you look back on the last two years, we completely rewrote the producer and consumer APIs, reworked the binary protocol many times over, and added the connector and stream processing apis, both major new additions. So I don't think we're in too much danger of stagnating!
My two cents was just around breaking compatibility for trivial changes like constructor => builder. I think this only applies to the producer, consumer, and connect apis which are heavily embedded in hundreds of ecosystem components that depend on them. This is different from direct usage. If we break the streams api it is really no big deal---apps just need to rebuild when they upgrade, not the end of the world at all. However because many intermediate things depend on the Kafka producer you can cause these weird situations where your app depends on two third party things that use Kafka and each requires different, incompatible versions. We did this a lot in earlier versions of Kafka and it was the cause of much angst (and an ingrained general reluctance to upgrade) from our users. I still think we may have to break things, i just don't think we should do it for things like builders vs direct constructors which i think are kind of a debatable matter of taste. -Jay On Mon, Apr 24, 2017 at 9:40 AM, Matthias J. Sax <matth...@confluent.io> wrote: > Hey Jay, > > I understand your concern, and for sure, we will need to keep the > current constructors deprecated for a long time (ie, many years). > > But if we don't make the move, we will not be able to improve. And I > think warnings about using deprecated APIs is an acceptable price to > pay. And the API improvements will help new people who adopt Kafka to > get started more easily. > > Otherwise Kafka might end up as many other enterprise software with a > lots of old stuff that is kept forever because nobody has the guts to > improve/change it. > > Of course, we can still improve the docs of the deprecated constructors, > too. > > Just my two cents. > > > -Matthias > > On 4/23/17 3:37 PM, Jay Kreps wrote: > > Hey guys, > > > > I definitely think that the constructors could have been better designed, > > but I think given that they're in heavy use I don't think this proposal > > will improve things. Deprecating constructors just leaves everyone with > > lots of warnings and crossed out things. We can't actually delete the > > methods because lots of code needs to be usable across multiple Kafka > > versions, right? So we aren't picking between the original approach > (worse) > > and the new approach (better); what we are proposing is a perpetual > > mingling of the original style and the new style with a bunch of > deprecated > > stuff, which I think is worst of all. > > > > I'd vote for just documenting the meaning of null in the ProducerRecord > > constructor. > > > > -Jay > > > > On Wed, Apr 19, 2017 at 3:34 PM, Stephane Maarek < > > steph...@simplemachines.com.au> wrote: > > > >> Hi all, > >> > >> My first KIP, let me know your thoughts! > >> https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/KAFKA/KIP+ > >> 141+-+ProducerRecordBuilder+Interface > >> > >> > >> Cheers, > >> Stephane > >> > > > >
