Hi, Over the past few months, we've received quite a lot of feedback on the consumer side features and design. Some of them are improvements to the current consumer design and some are simply new feature/API requests. I have attempted to write up the requirements that I've heard on this wiki - https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/KAFKA/Consumer+Client+Re-Design
This would involve some significant changes to the consumer APIs, so we would like to collect feedback on the proposal from our community. Since the list of changes is not small, we would like to understand if some features are preferred over others, and more importantly, if some features are not required at all. Since some part of this proposal is experimental and the consumer side changes are non-trivial, we would like this initiative to not interfere with the forthcoming replication release. However, it will be good to have people from the community give this some thought and help out with the JIRAs if interested. One way of managing this project could be creating a separate branch from the kafka trunk and continue development on it. Once it is ready and in good shape, we can think about cutting another release (after 0.8) for the releasing the new consumer API. Do people have preferences/concerns regarding creating a separate branch for this project ? Please feel free to start a discussion on this JIRA - https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/KAFKA-364 Thanks, Neha
