[BEAM-3620] Deprecate older kafka clients and make kafka clients a provided dependency

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: P2
• Resolution: Fixed
• Affects Version/s: 2.3.0
• Fix Version/s: 2.4.0
• Component/s: io-java-kafka
• Assignee: Raghu Angadi
• Reporter: Raghu Angadi
• Created: 06/Feb/18 01:02
• Updated: 16/May/20 13:44
• Resolved: 10/Feb/18 21:52

Description

Kafka versions 0.10.1 and above have better support for timestamps. We intend to deprecate older versions as a first step towards dropping the support entirely.

The older versions (0.9.x and 0.10.0) at run time still work, but KafkaIO itself does not support these at build time. It lets us remove some of the reflection based code used to support older versions at build time. 

Issue Links

• links to: GitHub Pull Request #4603
• links to: GitHub Pull Request #4778