KIP-25 — System test improvements

Accepted Kafka 1.0 Testing

KIP-25 overhauls Kafka's system test infrastructure by migrating from the legacy shell-script-based test suite to Ducktape, a Python-based distributed testing framework with service abstraction, failure injection, and cross-version compatibility testing. The existing tests were brittle, hard to maintain, and incapable of systematically testing rolling upgrades or multi-version scenarios.

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