When using Apache Kafka, you may decide to incorporate the schema registry provided by Confluent.
The schema registry stores schemas for your messages and the dedicated Kafka serializer and deserializer verify that your message content follows the rules defined in the current schema version.
The schema registry has an option latest.compatibilty.strict that allows
you to compare the schema generated from your class files with the one obtained
from the registry. If the two schemas are not backward compatible, you get an
error message.
Until pull request 3025 which I have submitted last week and which has been merged meanwhile, the error message did not contain any further information about the backward incompatible errors nor the two schemas.
As one of the two schemas is computed by the Confluent implementation, it was hard to exactly see where the differences are.
But now, as the PR was merged, you can examine the differences between the two schemas more easily.