Hi Michael, Avro does not follow the rules of semantic versioning. 1.9.x is a major version upgrade comparing 1.8.x (the "1" means the file format). Therefore, Avro has nothing to do with their braking changes. Maybe, it was not a good idea to upgrade Avro in Parquet but we already released this upgrade 1.11.0. I don't think it either that we should have released such an upgrade in a major release. In the past we already have done such upgrades. If we agree on allowing such upgrades in minor releases than the problems with the parquet+avro upgrade falls back to the consumers so this time to Spark. Seems that Spark has to upgrade its Avro dependencies as well and change the code accordingly.
Regards, Gabor
