NPE in BufferUtils.writeLengthEncode()

[mdeso]

When starting a Micronaut 4 application I get an NPE from within BufferUtils.writeLlengthEncode():

Caused by: java.lang.NullPointerException: Cannot invoke "String.getBytes(java.nio.charset.Charset)" because "val" is null
        at org.mariadb.r2dbc.util.BufferUtils.writeLengthEncode(BufferUtils.java:103)
        at org.mariadb.r2dbc.message.client.HandshakeResponse.writeConnectAttributes(HandshakeResponse.java:168)
        at org.mariadb.r2dbc.message.client.HandshakeResponse.encode(HandshakeResponse.java:143)
        at org.mariadb.r2dbc.client.MariadbPacketEncoder.encodeFlux(MariadbPacketEncoder.java:20)
        at reactor.core.publisher.FluxMapFuseable$MapFuseableSubscriber.onNext(FluxMapFuseable.java:113)

The causing line is

BufferUtils.writeLengthEncode(properties.getProperty("version"), buf);

The code there seems strange to me. It tries to read a file project.properties, as it seems from anywhere on the classpath. If that file isn't found it silently "eats" the signalling IOException. But if it is found it tries to read the version property from it and write it to the buffer as _client_version. And if the version property doesn't exist this causes the NPE. I would say this read-properties block should be removed completely, it makes no sense as it is completely optional. In my case it found a project.properties in some dependency which didn't contain the expected property, causing the NPE.

A workaround is to place a dummy "project.properties" with a version property in the classpath before any other potential candidate (which may be difficult under certain circumstances).