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Java has a convention where classes extending Throwable accept the cause of the Throwable as a second argument to the constructor. org.apache.kafka.common.config.ConfigException  however does not follow that convention as it has a constructor ConfigException(String name, Object value), which delegates to ConfigException(String name, Object value, String message) that in turn delegates to KafkaException(String message) . This API is brittle as developers often misuse the constructor with the intention of passing a cause as the second argument which never makes it to the stacktrace [1][2][3][4]. The cause and the throwable chain often proves useful in debugging the misconfiguration. For instance, when debugging incorrectly configured TLS in [1], it can help identify the cause of misconfiguration.

This KIP proposes the introduction of another constructor ConfigException(String message, Throwable cause) to adhere to the convention.

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