Hey all, Following up on the issue originally opened in https://github.com/apache/iceberg/issues/13651. The current behavior, which ignores any potential conflicts, can be very dangerous with metadata changes. This behavior can cause many potential issues - it can "revive" snapshots that were expired (like described in the issue above). It can also override changes in table properties, schema, sorting, etc.
I think we should consider changing the REPLACE TABLE behavior, and allow conflicts to happen, at least in the metadata.json level. Ignoring data-level conflicts still makes sense, so the fix can include only rebuilding the metadata to resolve the conflicts. What are your thoughts about this? Best, Guy
