Hi, guys! I have several thoughts about the new implemented KIP-158: "Kafka Connect should allow source connectors to set topic-specific settings for new topics"
We started to use 2.6.1 version and this feature and have some observations. I have described them also in the ticket: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/KAFKA-10340 I cannot understand, why we even have the property "topic.creation.enable" and do not create all topics by AdminClient? Isn't it a better approach to create topics always explicitly using AdminClient than to rely on auto creation? And also I cannot see how can it has a bad impact on users. Why someone may want to set "topic.creation.enable = false"? According to KIP-158 we have an option to set replication.factor and partitions to -1 to use the broker's default value. So why we cannot always create topics by AdminClient and use these broker's default values in case connector does not have any "topic.creation" properties? And also current approach can be a problem for us - we wanted to set "auto.create.topics.enable = false" on Kafka cluster by default. But we cannot do that, because our connectors can be created with "topic.creation" parameters or without them, we cannot guarantee that. And in case connectors have not this property, we get errors. As far as I understand this will completely solve the problem described in the KAFKA-10340 ticket. And also people will be able to set "auto.create.topics.enable = false" on Kafka cluster without any impact. Please, correct me if I am wrong and give me your opinion!
