#Public API and Javadocs In general, nothing can be removed or modified in way that is not backwards compatible. If something is deprecated, it can be removed after a couple of major releases, but in practice removing deprecated features requires sign off from product management.

All public and internal APIs should have useful javadocs. For all public APIs (anything not in /internal/), new additions to the javadocs should include an @since tag to let the users know when the feature was added. Eg

/**
   * Returns a collection of all of the CacheServers
   * that can serve the contents of this Cache> to clients.
   *
   * @see #addCacheServer
   *
   * @since 5.7
   */
  public List<CacheServer> getCacheServers();

Any feature which is deprecated should specify a link to the new alternative.