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To ensure that connectors using the new SinkRecord
getter methods can still be deployed on older versions of Kafka Connect, a try catch block should be used to catch and handle NoSuchMethodError
/ NoClassDefFoundError
(also see KIP-610: Error Reporting in Sink Connectors for reference which had the same issue). However, it should be clearly documented that the connector would not won't be compatible with topic/partition/offset mutating SMTs when deployed on older versions of Kafka Connect.
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