MINOR: Fix requests version conflict with ducktape in tests/setup.py

[tirthooo7]

Summary

Fix Python dependency conflict between requests and ducktape that
prevents kafkatest from being installed.

Problem

The tests/setup.py pins requests==2.32.4, but ducktape==0.12.0
internally requires requests==2.31.0. This causes pip to fail with :

ERROR: Cannot install kafkatest and kafkatest==4.3.0.dev0 because these
package versions have conflicting dependencies.
The conflict is caused by:
    kafkatest 4.3.0.dev0 depends on requests==2.32.4
    ducktape 0.12.0 depends on requests==2.31.0

This was introduced by dependabot PR #19940 which bumped requests from
2.31.0 to 2.32.4 without checking ducktape's transitive dependencies.

Solution

Change requests==2.32.4 to requests>=2.31.0. This allows pip to
install requests==2.31.0 (what ducktape needs) while still satisfying
the version constraint.

Changes

• tests/setup.py: Change strict pin requests==2.32.4 to flexible
  requests>=2.31.0

Testing

✅ System-test-Kafka-Branch-Builder - [Workflow] [21/21 tests
passed]
https://confluent-open-source-kafka-branch-builder-system-test-results.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/fix-cloud-tagging/2026-02-06--001.7f5b8f9a-4837-486a-864c-b5ad3b17391f--1770366328--confluentinc--fix-cloud-tagging--4b6335ab0f/report.html

• Test:
  tests/kafkatest/tests/client/client_compatibility_produce_consume_test.py

Notes

This is a minimal fix. An alternative would be upgrading to
ducktape==0.13.0 which requires requests==2.32.2, but that
introduces more changes and potential risk.

Reviewers: Manikumar Reddy manikumar.reddy@gmail.com, Chia-Ping Tsai
chia7712@gmail.com

[chia7712]

Is it worth updating ducktape to 0.13.0 in this PR?

[chia7712]

With the update, we can bump the lower bound to 2.32.2

[tirthooo7]

Hi @chia7712, thanks for the suggestion.

Based on this note:

kafka/tests/setup.py

Line 42 in 200f389

# Note: when changing the version of ducktape, also revise tests/docker/Dockerfile

We also need to update Docker, which would be a larger change and would require running the full test suite. We can pick this up later.

For now, this conflict is blocking Ducktape system test execution. If we fix this it will be easy to test ducktape 0.13.0 in future.

[chia7712]

@tirthooo7 you are right. I've opened https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/KAFKA-20153 to be a follow-up