Status

Current state: Draft

Discussion thread: here [Change the link from the KIP proposal email archive to your own email thread]

JIRA: here [Change the link from KAFKA-1 to your own ticket]

Please keep the discussion on the mailing list rather than commenting on the wiki (wiki discussions get unwieldy fast).

Motivation

In the `ConfigEntry` class, sometimes the `value` fields can be null. However, the users might assume the fields will not be null.

Public Interfaces

We plan to change the `value` field of the class to be `Optional<String>` to make it explicitly to the caller that it might well be null. And change the `value()` method to return an `Optional<String>` as well.

Proposed Changes

We plan to change the type of the value field to be an `Optional<String>` which requires us to also change the getter, `equals` and `hashCode` method.

Compatibility, Deprecation, and Migration Plan

Various callers that uses the constructor and getter will need to be changed to account for the change in type.

Rejected Alternatives