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• org.apache.kafka.common.record
• org.apache.kafka.clients.producer
• org.apache.kafka.streams.processor

Proposed Changes

Allow negative timestamps.

−1 value for timestamps stays a special value in Kafka as "no timestamp", which means we do not have a valid way to express The broker uses −1 as a default value for missing timestamp. Which might be a correct value set by the user:  Wednesday, December 31, 1969 111969 11:59:59.999 PM UTC.

The solution is to ignore that problem and it is a choice of the user to:

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If you do need to express Wednesday, December 31, 1969 11:59:59.999. PM UTC consider shifting it by one millisecond.

In general, there should be is no reason to fail on broker/client side working with negative timestamps.

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