Github user StephanEwen commented on the issue:
https://github.com/apache/flink/pull/5634
Just saw a good comment from @EronWright
> I think the ideal would be that idleness would occur only for tail reads,
i.e. due to a timeout from `kafkaConsumer.poll(pollTimeout)`. In other words,
an intermittent connection issue would ideally not trigger idleness.
Let's see if we can get that into the design somehow, without having too
specific logic inside the Kafka Consumer (making the Kafka Consumer more
complex is my personal Pet Peeve)
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