Hey All, I'd like to share with you a potential improvement to the workflow for Connect users that may make connector configurations easier to develop and debug. The focus for this is on reducing the number of manual steps involved in seeing the effects of a config change, so that each iteration is faster and a user can work through errors/misconfigurations faster.
The details should be found here: https://gitlab.gregswebserver.com/gharris1727/kafka-notes/-/wikis/Wishlist/ConfigCycleTime While exploring this idea, I implemented a change to the Connect Standalone runner which watches the provided configuration files for changes, and applies them to the worker as soon as they are discovered. The prototype branch can be found here: https://github.com/gharris1727/kafka/tree/prototype-standalone-config-watcher I wanted to put this out in order to ask a question of the maintainers: Does this sort of usability improvement belong in apache/kafka, or some external project? Would a KIP (or several) to implement this functionality upstream be warranted for further discussion? As-is, I believe that it is possible to implement all of this functionality in an external utility and/or a RestExtension without any (significant) upstream changes. This proposal would not constitute any strictly new use-cases, but rather make the Standalone Mode more viable for the stated use-case, which is for "ad hoc, small, or experimental jobs." Thanks in advance for your comments, Greg Harris
