Hello forks, Kafka 4.0 is a major release that introduces significant changes. We have deprecated outdated APIs and established a new baseline version of 2.1 as defined in KIP-896. While there has been extensive discussion in related PRs regarding broker-client compatibility, the client upgrade and migration paths have not been explicitly defined. For the client module, the current tentative baseline is version 2.0, which was already discussed in PR[1]. A new KIP will be introduced to further clarify this. However, what I’m particularly curious about is why KIP-896 set the baseline version to 2.1 instead of 2.0. I would appreciate any insights on this.
[1]Discussion PR <https://github.com/apache/kafka/pull/18193#issuecomment-2572283545> Best regards, Jiunn-Yang
