Hi Aditya,
Thanks for your reply. I'm not dismissing your concern, but I'm not entirely 
happy with a way forward yet.

AK1: I wonder whether we could use a pipe here to avoid the intermediate file. 
After all, export uses stdout as the destination, so if we could use stdin as 
the source. For example, I've used '-' with --from-file below to indicate 
stdin. It could be --from-stdin or similar too.

$ bin/kafka-consumer-groups.sh --bootstrap-server localhost:9092 
--export-offsets --group CG1 --topic T1 --to-current | 
bin/kafka-consumer-groups.sh --bootstrap-server localhost:9092 --reset-offsets 
--group CG2 --from-file - --topic T1 --execute

This would still allow resetting between different group types, which is 
actually the use case that got me into this, taking offsets from a consumer 
group to initialise a share group.

Thanks,
Andrew

On 2026/08/12 18:12:08 Aditya Kousik wrote:
> Hi Andrew. 
> 
> Thanks for addressing AK2-4: lgtm
> 
> On AK1: I’m thinking from a user experience standpoint. The teams managing 
> the kafka clusters and the ones using the clients diverge - but the Admin 
> role may be exposed via self-service typically via API requests and a K8S 
> CRD. I’m thinking of the latter case where Kafka SRE allow a thin wrapper for 
> client teams to manage their own groups and topics and also isolating the 
> environment where the scripts can be run. In such a case, it becomes 
> cumbersome to fetch/write the csv file from a Pod that runs the migration ; 
> it may not have any volume to persist it or running kubectl to scp the file 
> is usually denied. So in such a case, the migrate offsets script could just 
> be a single command that fetches offsets from one group and applies it to 
> another (or several) without the middleman CSV.
> 
> Thanks,
> Aditya
> 
> > On Aug 12, 2026, at 06:39, Andrew Schofield <[email protected]> wrote:
> > 
> > Hi Aditya,
> > Thanks for your reply. Sorry for the delay.
> > 
> > AK1: One of the advantages of the file is that it's possible to export from 
> > one group type and import into another. You can also export offsets for 
> > multiple groups, and this changes the file format (4 columns instead of 3). 
> > Sadly, this is all existing behaviour that I only learnt by trial and 
> > error. Personally, I think that export-import is a relatively infrequent 
> > operation, and the KIP makes enough of a step forward. I wonder if you 
> > could elaborate a bit more on your idea. Feel free to push back if you 
> > disagree.
> > 
> > AK2: The KIP does not mention this and I wasn't quite sure where to add it. 
> > You are correct. Should we improve the javadoc for the admin client?
> > 
> > AK3: Yes, Admin is better. KIP updated.
> > 
> > AK4: The DescribeGroupsGeneric RPC is intended as a way of getting a 
> > minimal set of group information for groups of any group types. It is used 
> > in Admin.describeGroups and this would be the initial Admin call from 
> > bin/kafka-XXXX-groups.sh when exporting or resetting offsets. It gives a 
> > way to check the group type and existence unambiguously. By contrast, if 
> > you use Admin.describeXXXGroups() for an existing group ID of the wrong 
> > type, the error code is GROUP_ID_NOT_FOUND.
> > 
> > AK4.1: I didn't include the members intentionally. This RPC is agnostic to 
> > group type. I think the common subset of group attributes is group ID, 
> > group type, group state and coordinator. If you dig deeper, you find that 
> > the group types differ. For example, assignments in consumer groups and 
> > share groups are partitions, while in streams groups they are tasks. I 
> > expect we'll add connect groups one day, and until we have the KIP, I 
> > wouldn't want to assume the details of membership.
> > 
> > AK4.2: This is following existing convention I'm afraid and I want to be 
> > consistent. If the broker does not send back a list of ACL operations, then 
> > this will be null. This is different than an empty set which means "you are 
> > not authorized", as opposed to "you don't know anything about authorized 
> > operations".
> > 
> > Thanks,
> > Andrew
> > 
> >> On 2026/07/27 05:45:27 Aditya Kousik wrote:
> >> A small correction.
> >> 
> >> I meant to add a statement before the numbered comments.
> >> 
> >> “Since the KIP motivation revolves around usability of the script, would 
> >> you be willing to consider the following:”
> >> 
> >> Also, typo on AK2. “…As long as there aren’t any active members in the 
> >> group subscription”.
> >> 
> >> -Aditya
> >> 
> >>>> On Jul 25, 2026, at 23:53, Aditya Kousik <[email protected]> wrote:
> >>> 
> >>> Hi Andrew,
> >>> 
> >>> Thanks for this KIP, I’ve personally faced more than one scenario where 
> >>> I’ve had to use the admin client to update the offsets.
> >>> 
> >>> The main uses cases teams face ( and TIL about the various options the 
> >>> script offers):
> >>> Teams migrating to a new consumer group from an existing one but don’t 
> >>> want to commit to either (or duration for newer clients) auto offset 
> >>> reset policy on the new group.
> >>> Teams want to seek past certain offsets in partitions because they have 
> >>> poison pill messages/corrupted deserialization story and they have no 
> >>> control over the data. In this case, they actually want latest offset 
> >>> strategy but most don’t even realise that it applies to streams out of 
> >>> range and are surprised/frustrated that the property doesn’t move their 
> >>> position in the queues. (I see we can do this already in the script today)
> >>> When I migrated our clients from 2.x directly to 4.x, out of abundance of 
> >>> caution, I wrote an hourly cron job that dumps the snapshot of 
> >>> group_id,topic,partition,offset into csv files so that if I had to revert 
> >>> a few affected partitions I can trim the csv down to those partitions and 
> >>> alter them with the admin client.
> >>> 
> >>> AK1. A single command line with args —source-group-id —target-group-id 
> >>> —export so that the intermediate CSV file can be skipped.
> >>> AK2. Minor: The KIP does not mention the alter/list consumer group 
> >>> offsets Admin call. alter only works as long as there are active members 
> >>> in the group subscription. I was bitten by this in the past; the 
> >>> documentation was sparse around that expectation but it does make sense.
> >>> AK3. KIP references AdminClient but I believe this is deprecated in 
> >>> favour of just Admin which is the interface that has the methods?
> >>> AK4. How do we leverage the describe groups RPC when using the 
> >>> script/admin client? I’m trying to imagine flows other than the export 
> >>> group offsets.
> >>> AK4.1 Can we list active members/offset state in a given group in 
> >>> addition to the GroupState? This has helped identify zombie processes to 
> >>> hunt down. The broker’s view would be useful here. (related to AK2)
> >>> AK4.2 Could we return empty set of acl operations instead of null?
> >>> 
> >>> Best,
> >>> Aditya
> >>> 
> >>> 
> >>>> On 2026/06/17 06:34:11 Andrew Schofield wrote:
> >>>> Hi,
> >>>> I’d like to start discussion on a small KIP to improve the usability of 
> >>>> the command-line tools for resetting group offsets. When implementing 
> >>>> KIP-1323 and reviewing the PRs, it became clear that the usability of 
> >>>> this area of Kafka isn’t great. This KIP improves the usability of these 
> >>>> tools.
> >>>> 
> >>>> https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/KAFKA/KIP-1359%3A+Improve+usability+of+resetting+group+offsets
> >>>> 
> >>>> Thanks,
> >>>> Andrew
> >>>> 
> >> 
> 

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