Optionally don't make a query fail with USE INDEX (non_existing_index)

A query like this:

SELECT ... FROM t USE INDEX (index_name) ...

will fail with an error if specified index does not exist. This seems to me the best behaviour in test environment, but dangerous in production. Think about this case: my db is used in production, at some point I remove an index which seems useless, and suddenly some queries fail.

So what I'm asking (unless you have better ideas to solve this problem) is having a new system variable which determines if queries like this should fail with an error, or just produce a warning.