Cleaning up a topic that has had its metadata deleted

[Kevin Mao <km...@gmail.com>]

Hello,

I have a problem with my Kafka cluster (0.8.2) where there's a topic that
has had its partition metadata deleted from
/brokers/topics/exampleTopic/partitions in Zookeeper. I think this confused
the brokers and caused them to end up in a state where I'm unable to delete
the topic using kafka-topics.

Some of the brokers are also continually printing these messages to
server.log:

[2016-04-05 00:51:02,348] WARN [Replica Manager on Broker 1]: While
recording the follower position, the partition [problem-topic,2] hasn't
been created, skip updating leader HW (kafka.server.ReplicaManager)
[2016-04-05 00:51:02,349] WARN [Replica Manager on Broker 1]: Fetch request
with correlation id 190239506 from client ReplicaFetcherThread-0-3021 on
partition [problem-topic,2] failed due to Partition [problem-topic,2]
doesn't exist on 1 (kafka.server.ReplicaManager)

Is there a way to safely remove this topic from my cluster? I do not care
about recovering the data within the topic.

Thanks!