Hey, everyone. After encountering a number of issues arising from the use of various Avro encoder/decoder implementations, each with a varying degree of specification compliance, I've begun implementing a thorough schema compliance checker. While going through the specification, however, I believe there's an inconsistency: the documentation for fixed types omits an optional doc attribute.
Given the type, and its similarity to other like-types, this omission doesn't seem to make sense. Likewise, the overall Avro specification appears to conflict with the IDL specification, which states, "Comments that begin with /** are used as the documentation string for the type or field definition that follows the comment." In this case, it seems a doc attribute is valid for all type/field definitions, including fixed types. If I'm misunderstanding this inconsistency, please let me know. Otherwise, if doc is a valid attribute for any type/field definition, can the specification be updated appropriately? While I also posted this to dev list, that seems to contain more Jira-related updates than discussion. Also, I didn't think this inquiry warranted a Jira ticket. As this is something I'm working on to enable our engineering team to move forward with Avro as our common serialization format, time is of the essence. All ideas/suggestions are appreciated. -- Jonah H. Harris
