Hi folks, During review of PR #5328 <https://github.com/apache/polaris/pull/5328>, we encountered a question: is it valid for a storage endpoint change to make an existing table’s metadata URI return different content?
For example, two S3-compatible stores contain s3://warehouse/orders/metadata/xxx.metadata.json with the same table UUID: - Endpoint A’s metadata points to table metadata A. - Endpoint B’s metadata points to table metadata B. Changing the catalog’s endpoint from A to B changes the metadata returned without updating the table’s metadata pointer. Neither underlying object was modified. Does this violate Iceberg’s metadata immutability model, or is immutability scoped to each underlying storage object? Are there legitimate migration or recovery workflows that require this behavior? My understanding is that an existing metadata location should continue to identify the same content after storage configuration changes. Clarifying this contract would help determine whether metadata caching needs to account for storage endpoints. Yufei
