Hi all, I've been working on creating a KIP for one of the jiras that aim to refactor the admin commands (KAFKA-3268 <https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/KAFKA-3268> -> KAFKA-5722 <https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/KAFKA-5722>) and I see that the KIPs related to these are still under discussion or voting (KIP-183 <https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/KAFKA/KIP-183+-+Change+PreferredReplicaLeaderElectionCommand+to+use+AdminClient> and KIP-179 <https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/KAFKA/KIP-179+-+Change+ReassignPartitionsCommand+to+use+AdminClient> ).
Hence I'd like to raise the question separately whether it'd be useful to create a --dry-run option generally for every new admin command going forward. I think that this would be very useful for provisioning changes, especially if somebody wants to make sure they don't crash the prod system with their change and the result of the command is what they really want. Furthermore automatic provisioning tools would also benefit from this. I imagine that in case of the dry-run the broker side wouldn't run the command but only provide the changed state in some form. For example the changed partitions in case of the partition reassignment tool or the altered topics in case of the config-commands tool, however the format really depends on the tool being used. What do you guys think? Would such an addition make sense? Regards, Viktor
