Deprecate joining over a different number of levels (pandas-dev#40993)

Author: phofl

doc/source/whatsnew/v1.3.0.rst

@@ -601,6 +601,7 @@ Deprecations
 - Deprecated :meth:`.Styler.set_na_rep` and :meth:`.Styler.set_precision` in favour of :meth:`.Styler.format` with ``na_rep`` and ``precision`` as existing and new input arguments respectively (:issue:`40134`, :issue:`40425`)
 - Deprecated allowing partial failure in :meth:`Series.transform` and :meth:`DataFrame.transform` when ``func`` is list-like or dict-like and raises anything but ``TypeError``; ``func`` raising anything but a ``TypeError`` will raise in a future version (:issue:`40211`)
 - Deprecated support for ``np.ma.mrecords.MaskedRecords`` in the :class:`DataFrame` constructor, pass ``{name: data[name] for name in data.dtype.names}`` instead (:issue:`40363`)
+- Deprecated using :func:`merge` or :func:`join` on a different number of levels (:issue:`34862`)
 - Deprecated the use of ``**kwargs`` in :class:`.ExcelWriter`; use the keyword argument ``engine_kwargs`` instead (:issue:`40430`)
 - Deprecated the ``level`` keyword for :class:`DataFrame` and :class:`Series` aggregations; use groupby instead (:issue:`39983`)
 - Deprecated :func:`merge` producing duplicated columns through the ``suffixes`` keyword  and already existing columns (:issue:`22818`)