Scan#setRowPrefixFilter incorrectly marked as deprecated

Issue HBASE-25299 is about the Scan#setRowPrefixFilter having not the expected effects when using also the setStartRow and/or setStopRow.

The setRowPrefixFilter is intended to make setting the right startRow and stopRow for prefix scans. So it was always intended of using it instead of doing separate setStartRow and/or setStopRow calls.

The reason for adding this to the Scan (~ 8 years ago, HBASE-11990 ) was that calculating the correct start and stop row for doing the very efficient prefix scan is very very hard to do right in the generic case.

This is still a current usecase and many of my applications rely on this function (I even prefer the HBase Client when connecting to Google BigTable for this method).

With issue HBASE-25299 it has now been marked as deprecated.
Quote from the changes made in HBASE-25299:

@deprecated since 3.0.0. The scan result might be unexpected in some cases.

Yes, if you use this very valuable method incorrectly it will yield incorrect results.
I do not consider this a valid reason to deprecate it.

So I do agree with the confusion of the effects as described in HBASE-25299 which should be fixed with additional documentation.

I disagree with the deprecation of this method.
 

I'll put up a pull request in which I improve the documentation and remove the deprecation.