Exceptions play a critical role in the API of your library. Developers using your library depend on accurate descriptions of where and why exceptions might be thrown from your package. Documentation is critical. Also maintaining the types of messages that are thrown is also an important requirement for maintaining backwards-compatibility.
Because Exceptions are critical to the API of your package, you must ensure that you don't break backwards compatibility by making changes to exceptions.
Things that break BC include:
Any change to which methods throw exceptions.
A change whereby a method throws an exception higher in the
inheritance tree. For example, if you changed your method to throw a
PEAR_Exception rather than a
PEAR_IOException, you would be breaking backwards
compatibility.
Things that do not break BC:
Throwing a subclass of the original exception. For example,
changing a method to throw PEAR_IOException when
before it had been throwing PEAR_Exception would
not break BC (provided that PEAR_IOException
extends PEAR_Exception).