Maybe we should have a written deprecation policy somewhere? Any way... copy-pasting what I wrote in a related thread:
If we deprecated something on 10.0 and not 9.x because 9.x doesn't have the new method/class, my instinct is that we may remove the thing at any 10.x version (even 10.1) -- need not wait for 11. If we must wait for 11, I think this imposes too much of a burden on us. I guess if folks disagree with my assertion above, committers may nonetheless choose to delete in 10.x *anyway* provided that the deprecated thing is "internal" (subjectively determined). For internal things, in my strong opinion, the deprecation was a courtesy and/or is equivalent to a TODO comment that can be accomplished at-will. We remove interal methods at-will all the time without a deprecation or TODO!! ~ David Smiley Apache Lucene/Solr Search Developer http://www.linkedin.com/in/davidwsmiley
