If you do security fix releases for your OSS software, please don't remove methods at the same time. And if you introduce anything that potentially could break things, please bump the major version number. https://github.com/urllib3/urllib3/blob/8864ac407bba8607950025e0979c4c69bc7abc7b/CHANGES.rst#removals Not there are critical security fixes that cannot be pushed to a linux distro without risking that stuff breaks.