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Whether the topic should be auto-created will be included in MetadataRequest sent by the consumer. MetadataRequest v4 had earlier introduced a way to specify if a topic should be auto-created when requesting metadata for specific topics. If the broker is old and does not support v4, we will fallback to the default behavior of not specifying auto topic creation; the broker configuration will then control whether we automatically create topics or not.

Compatibility, Deprecation, and Migration Plan

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