Hi everyone, Apologize if this is landing twice, my first attempt got lost somewhere in transit :)
I have a PR that attempts to address https://github.com/apache/iceberg/issues/4849, basically adding logic to ignore downcasting column types when "mergeSchema" is set when an existing column type is long and the new schema has an int type for the same column. My solution involves updates to UnionByNameVisitor and this may end up changing the behavior of our public api in a way that hasn't previously been documented. Questions raised during the review is whether we should do one of the following: 1. Update our docs in UpdateSchema.unionByNameWith <http://updateschema.unionbynamewith/> and callout something like "We ignore differences in type if the new type is narrower than the existing type", or 2. We add a new api UpdateSchema.unionByNameWith(Schema newSchema, boolean ignoreTypeNarrowing) Any feedback would be appreciated, thanks for your time. Cheers, --Rocco
