Page History

...

As part of this KIP we will change how the ListOffsets API behaves. We won't add any fields, but we will introduce a new behaviour on the broker when a timestamp with value of -5 is requested. Going forward, when provided with a timestamp of -5 a broker will return the latest tiered offset. We don't need to add -4 as it has already been added as part of previous KIPs.

The behaviour of asking for the earliest-local timestamp (-4) when Tiered Storage is not enabled is to return the earliest timestamp (-2). We need to define the behaviour of asking for the latest-tiered timestamp (-5) when Tiered Storage is not enabled. In such a situation, -5 should return the same as -2. The reason we want to return the same rather than 0, for example, is that we should be returning an offset which is in the current bounds of the log.

[1] https://kafka.apache.org/36/javadoc/org/apache/kafka/clients/admin/OffsetSpec.html

...