Hi,
yes, the Flink Kafka connector for Kafka 0.8 handles broker leader changes without failing. The SimpleConsumer provided by Kafka 0.8 doesn't handle that.
The 0.9 Flink Kafka consumer also supports broker leader changes transparently.
If you keep using the Flink Kafka 0.8 connector with a 0.9 broker, you will need to change the protocol version of the 0.9 broker, so that the old client can talk to it. I would recommend using matching consumer and broker versions.
Regards,
Robert