Hi Yong, Thanks for initiating this discussion!
I have some concerns regarding this specific category of configuration flags. Introduced in [1124], their original purpose appears to have been preventing unexpected behavioral changes in Polaris – even when the older behavior was incorrect. However, I believe we now have clearer evolution guidelines and better methods for communicating breaking changes to our users. It's also important, I think, to never expose a flag that users could leverage to enable buggy behavior. Finally, these flags were explicitly designated as temporary workarounds, yet they are still present, nearly a year later. I propose that we start cleaning up this group of flags, promoting all the valid ones to standard, permanent configuration flags. I don't think they should be documented as they exist today. Thanks, Alex [1124]: https://github.com/apache/polaris/pull/1124 On Fri, Feb 6, 2026 at 4:03 AM Yong Zheng <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hello, > > We are missing doc for > https://github.com/apache/polaris/blob/main/polaris-core/src/main/java/org/apache/polaris/core/config/BehaviorChangeConfiguration.java. > Some of the parameters are really handy and being implicitly set by > OpenCatalog as well. Finding the behavior different between Polaris and > OpenCatalog and digging through code to find the missing configurations is > not very fun. I am wondering if we should add these valid configurations to > our public page. Once concern from community is "those flags have been there > for a long time now and were neither removed nor promoted to stable flags". > > What do your guys think? They are still valid configuration and there is no > sign/plan to remove afaik. Should we add them to avoid the code digging? > > Thanks, > Yong Zheng
