Rails - Nov 2005 - habtm's collection_remove deprecated

Hi,

I''m new to Rails and I have a question about the collection_remove
method added to models with has_and_belongs_to_many associations. This
function is not listed in the documentation, but is still there in
Rails 0.14.

I noticed this in the source for has_and_belongs_to_many:

# deprecated api
. . .
deprecated_remove_association_relation(association_name)

What does it mean for a method to be deprecated? Will future versions
of Rails drop it? In that case, should I replace it with some manual
functionality (collection.delete does only half the job as it deletes
the corresponding row in the join table but doesn''t remove the object
from the collection)?

Thanks.