Pekko 1.1.2 with Netty 4.2.x

[mateczagany]

Hi! I am looking into the possibility of upgrading Netty to 4.2.x in Apache Flink that still uses Pekko 1.1.2. I know that Pekko 1.1.2 was compiled with Netty 4.1.114.Final, but do you see any risk using Pekko 1.1.2 with Netty 4.2.2? In my limited testing everything worked well, and I think that's expected as Netty 4.2.0 did not introduce any breaking change in the API according to them.

Another question related to this, do you have any ETA for 1.2.0 being released given that you have upgraded to Netty 4.2 there? I see that M2 is being released soon, but I'm not sure how many milestone releases the community plans to release.

Thank you!

[pjfanning]

I'd expect it to be ok. But you'd have to test it out.
1.2.0-M2 is probably the last milestone before a full 1.2.0 release but that will take a month or more. I wouldn't wait for it if simply upgrading Netty works.

[He-Pin]

The netty 4.2 is using adaptive bytebuf allocator by default, but in pekko , we are using.the polled one by default for now, because there have some issues in the new one.

A 1.2.0 will be released soon。

[rovarga]

I have recently migrated OpenDaylight to use Netty 4.2. There were only two compatibility concerns I have had to deal with:

1. SslContextBuilder defaults to HTTPS hostname verification (noted in https://github.com/netty/netty/wiki/Netty-4.2-Migration-Guide#compatibility-highlights). AFAICT Pekko does not use SslContextBuilder, so it should be fine.
2. netty-codec is now an empty jar pulling in other dependencies (kinda noted in https://github.com/netty/netty/wiki/Netty-4.2-Migration-Guide#lesser-compatibility-changes). This becomes a concern if Pekko decides to to compine against Netty-4.2.x, in my case this resulted in changing netty-codec dependencies to netty-codec-base to get the desired dependency graph.