[VOTE] 4.2.0 RC0

[Christo Lolov]

Hello Kafka users, developers and client-developers,

This is the RC0 candidate for release of Apache Kafka 4.2.0.

This release has many exciting changes such as Kafka Queues being
marked as production-ready, dead letter queues in Kafka Streams, a
preview of the new Kafka Streams rebalance protocol, improved
consistency across Kafka CLI arguments and metrics!

I will raise a PR with a new blog post to the kafka-site repository in
the next 24 hours and share the link as a reply to this thread.

Release notes for the 4.2.0 release:
https://dist.apache.org/repos/dist/dev/kafka/4.2.0-rc0/RELEASE_NOTES.html

*** Please download, test and vote by Wednesday, January 21, 10am UTC

Kafka's KEYS file containing PGP keys we use to sign the release:
https://kafka.apache.org/KEYS

* Release artifacts to be voted upon (source and binary):
https://dist.apache.org/repos/dist/dev/kafka/4.2.0-rc0/

* Docker release artifacts to be voted upon:
apache/kafka:4.2.0-rc0
apache/kafka-native:4.2.0-rc0

* Maven artifacts to be voted upon:
https://repository.apache.org/content/groups/staging/org/apache/kafka/

* Javadoc:
https://dist.apache.org/repos/dist/dev/kafka/4.2.0-rc0/javadoc/index.html

* Tag to be voted upon (off 4.2 branch) is the 4.2.0 tag:
https://github.com/apache/kafka/releases/tag/4.2.0-rc0

* Documentation:
I will raise a PR with the changes to the kafka-site repository in the
next 24 hours and share the link as a reply to this thread.

* Protocol:
I will raise a PR with the changes to the kafka-site repository in the
next 24 hours and share the link as a reply to this thread.

* Successful CI builds for the 4.2 branch:
Unit/integration tests:
https://github.com/apache/kafka/actions/runs/20953445348/job/60245258542
System tests: My environment needs to be recreated before I can share
results from my end, so any results shared by voters would be greatly
appreciated!

* Successful Docker Image Github Actions Pipeline for 4.2 branch:
Docker Build Test Pipeline (JVM):
https://github.com/apache/kafka/actions/runs/20962291986
Docker Build Test Pipeline (Native):
https://github.com/apache/kafka/actions/runs/20958037429

Note - when I run the quickstart against the JVM Docker image I need
to specify the process.roles. I do not seem to need to specify the
process.roles if I run the 4.1.1 image. I will run this once again
tomorrow in another clean environment, but if somebody else can
confirm/deny whether they can reproduce this beforehand this would
also be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,
Christo