To have effect, @deprecated needs to be an annotation.

This was intended to be deprecated in 2.11.0 based on the commit and text, but apparently wasn't.

I don't know whether this can still be pulled into the 2.11 branch or not, but if this was the intent, it should be pulled there as well as 2.12.x; otherwise, I'll resubmit with 2.12.0 as the deprecation version.