Hello,
let me clarify the title first.
In the original proposal for the connector externalization we said that
an externalized connector has to exist in parallel with the version
shipped in the main Flink release for 1 cycle.
For example, 1.16.0 shipped with the elasticsearch connector, but at the
same time there's the externalized variant as a drop-in replacement, and
the 1.17.0 release will not include a ES connector.
The rational was to give users some window to update their projects.
We are now about to externalize a few more connectors (cassandra,
pulsar, jdbc), targeting 1.16 within the next week.
The 1.16.0 release has now been about a month ago; so it hasn't been a
lot of time since then.
I'm now wondering if we could/should treat these connectors as
externalized for 1.16, meaning that we would remove them from the master
branch now, not ship them in 1.17 and move all further development into
the connector repos.
The main benefit is that we won't have to bother with syncing changes
across repos all the time.
We would of course need some sort-of cutoff date for this (December
9th?), to ensure there's still some reasonably large gap left for users
to migrate.
Let me know what you think.
Regards,
Chesnay
