[GitHub] [kafka] rhauch commented on pull request #9950: KAFKA-12170: Fix for Connect Cast SMT to correctly transform a Byte array into a string

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rhauch commented on pull request #9950:
URL: https://github.com/apache/kafka/pull/9950#issuecomment-783634110


   Before this fix, the changes made in #4820 ([KAFKA-6684](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/KAFKA-6684)) resulted in `toString()` being called on `byte[]` and `ByteBuffer`. As highlighted in this PR and issue that `ByteBuffer.toString()` is not useful, but the `toString()` on `byte[]` still works. This PR seems to change that behavior, which would not be backward compatible.
   
   The discussion on PR #4820 also talked about making this compatible with `Values.convertToString(...)`, which for `byte[]` and `ByteBuffer` results in a base 64 encoded string (with `ISO-8859-1` encoding). See the [Values code for details](https://github.com/apache/kafka/blob/95f51539c8d0b88bd7f285011d42e2d1117107de/connect/api/src/main/java/org/apache/kafka/connect/data/Values.java#L673-L682).
   
   Because of this, it seems much more sensible to also use base64 here for `ByteBuffer` so it matches the existing behavior with `byte[]`. 
   
   I agree that it maybe doesn't suffice in all user situations, so if we also want to support other encodings we'd need other config changes that will require using the KIP mechanism to propose such enhancements.


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