I'm wondering why the default setting for auto.offset.reset in the ConsumerConfig class was changed from 'smallest' to 'largest', so late in the game (looks like a commit on June 3 changed the default). This is an extremely major change, I should think. Consumers now by default only get messages newer than when the consumer starts?
What use cases are there for that? I can think of one off cases, where you just want to start consuming the latest feed, etc., to bootstrap things. But in the normal case, where you want to take a consumer down for an update, and bring it back up, you'd always be losing messages in that case. The default of the old (now renamed) "autooffset.reset" property in 0.7.2 is "smallest", so this is a major change. Sadly, this one change caused me many hours of consternation with some broken tests (e.g. KAFKA-945). I don't see any mention of this change listed in any messages to the group, etc. It might be good to have a configuration migration page outlining changes from 0.7.2. This change is particularly difficult since it is in a default setting that in most cases people had been using the default (and now will override the default in most cases). Jason
