Anyone that used it would need to limit there jQuery version to something earlier than 1.9. As far as a work around, there is nothing mentioned in the docs. I'm sure there is a way to continue working without it, it would depend on what you were going to do with it.
The docs do mention this in regards to plugins Plugins that need to use a selector should have the caller pass in the
selector as part of the plugin's arguments during initialization.
Yes, that's right and I can iterate through the elements of the collection with "each()". But I suppose there's no more way in future to make the plugin aware of the selector-string? (be it only for debugging purposes)