Liquibase will handle the drop index change across branches fine, but since you are going from a version that contains code (a drop index change) to one that does not expect that you are going to end up with your broken app state.
With liquibase, changes are completely independent of each other and independent of any versioning. You can think of the liquibase changelog as an ordered list of changes to make that each have a unique identifier. When you do an update, liquibase checks each change in turn to see if it has been ran and runs it if it has not.
Any "versioning" is purely within your codebase and branching scheme, liquibase does not care.
Imagine you start out with your 1.1.0 release that looks like:
- change a
- change b
- change c
when you deploy 1.1.0, the customer database will know changes a,b, and c were ran.
You have v2.1 with new changesets to the end of your changelog file, so it looks like:
- change a
- change b
- change c
- change x
- change y
- change z
and all 2.1 customers database know that a,b,c,x,y,z are applied.
When you create 1.1.0.1 with changeset d that drops your index, you end up with this changelog in the 1.1.0.1 branch:
- change a
- change b
- change c
- change d
But when you upgrade your 1.1.0.1 customers to 2.1, liquibase just compares the defined changesets of (a,b,c,x,y,z) against the known changesets of (a,b,c,d) and runs x,y,z. It doesn't care that there is an already ran changeset of d, it does nothing about that.
The liquibase diff support can be used as a bit of a sanity check and would be able to report that there is a missing index compared to some "correct" database, but that is not something you would normally do in a production deployment scenario.