I've taken a second look to KIP-158 after syncing with Randall Hauch, who was the original author of the proposal, and I have updated the KIP in place.
The main new features of this updated KIP-158 is the introduction of groups of configs that can be composed and the ability to match topics to these groups via the use of regex. The design builds on top of the existing definition of config groups used in single message transformations (SMT) and therefore I'm hoping that the approach fits well in Kafka Connect's current configuration capabilities. The new proposal aims to strike a good balance between requiring to explicitly set the configs for each possible topic or having a one-size-fits-all default set of properties for all the topics a connector may create during runtime. The updated KIP-158 can be found under the same page as the old one: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/KAFKA/KIP-158%3A+Kafka+Connect+should+allow+source+connectors+to+set+topic-specific+settings+for+new+topics I've intentionally changed the title here in this thread to avoid confusion with the threads that discussed KIP-158 previously. Looking forward to your comments and hoping we can pick up this work from the very good starting point that was reached in the previous discussions. Best, Konstantine