KIP-1012 — The need for a Kafka 3.8 and 3.9 release

Accepted Broker

Proposes releasing Kafka 3.8 and 3.9 as minor releases before the 4.0 major release to allow time to complete KRaft feature parity (e.g., JBOD support) that the community depends on before removing ZooKeeper entirely. Without these intermediary releases, operators would be forced to upgrade to 4.0 before critical features are ready.

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