Removing APIs without warning or a deprecation period?

[mrlacey]

Is there a standard practice/convention used for deprecating and removing APIs?

I ask because I updated from 11.0.0 to 11.2.0 (skipping 11.1.0) and the method I was using no longer exists. (It was removed in 11.1.0)
I consider this a breaking change and not something I'd expect from a minor version update.

The method I was using was removed here: https://github.com/CommunityToolkit/Maui/pull/2193/files#diff-472ea386101015eecd45359f7e2c25385ce4ba6e884d303a00e4dab8aa401e92

The release notes refer to the related change say they "Enhance DrawingView and DrawingViewService to ..." with nothing about removals or breaking changes.

Looking at the discussion on the related PR (#2193) it appears that breaking changes (the removal of public APIs) was done after the "breaking change" label was removed from the PR.

Rather than solely relying on manually flagging breaking changes, can things like this (removing public APIs) be detected to ensure they are labelled correctly?

This also assumes that the removal of a public API counts as a breaking change. It would be good to have a clear definition.

If something is to be removed, can there be a period where it is flagged as deprecated/obsolete before removal? So we have time to prepare.

Hopefully this is just a one-off that slipped through the gaps. (I seem especially blessed to run into such things on a regular basis.)

[bijington]

I can only apologise for this, it was a change that I made and somehow didn't revisit the breaking nature of the PR by the time it was ready for merging. Usually we would aim to give you time to migrate to the new approach rather than pulling the rug out from under you.

As for the approach we try to consider this as much as possible when making changes and usually label the PR as breaking to make it clear. This is very much a manual process though, I would love to hear thoughts on how we could detect things like a public API change.