[Gradle] Distinguish non-Unit-return false positives from real instability in stability dump #205

Is your feature request related to a problem?

Every @Composable function that returns a non-Unit value is reported as skippable: false and restartable: false in the .stability dump, no matter how stable its parameters are. This is expected Compose compiler behavior — the compiler only generates skip/restart group logic for Unit-returning composables, since skipping means "do nothing and return", which isn't possible when a value must be produced. It is not a real stability regression.

The dump gives no way to distinguish this compiler-inherent case from an actual problem (unstable/unknown params). Minimal repro:

@Composable
private fun borderColor(enabled: Boolean): Color =
    if (enabled) Color.Red else Color.Gray

Generated dump (unstableOnly = true):

@Composable
private fun com.example.borderColor(enabled: kotlin.Boolean): androidx.compose.ui.graphics.Color
  skippable: false
  restartable: false
  params:
    - enabled: STABLE (primitive type)

enabled is STABLE and there are no other params, yet the function is still flagged — purely because it returns Color instead of Unit. In a large codebase this produces a steady stream of dump entries that reviewers have to manually re-verify are non-issues every time, and CI/baseline diffing can't tell them apart from genuine regressions.

Describe the solution you'd like:

Give consumers a way to separate "flagged only because of non-Unit return type, params otherwise stable" from real instability, for example:

• Per-entry metadata, e.g. nonSkippableReason: NON_UNIT_RETURN_TYPE, when skippable/restartable are false solely because the return type isn't Unit and every param is STABLE.
• Or a stabilityValidation { } option (alongside the existing unstableOnly) such as ignoreNonUnitReturnFalsePositives = true that excludes these entries from the dump entirely.

Describe alternatives you've considered:

We currently post-process the generated .stability file ourselves in the consuming Gradle module: parsing the skippable: / restartable: / params: lines with regex to strip out entries matching this pattern, and deleting the file once nothing else is left. It works, but it's brittle text-parsing against a format the plugin explicitly says not to hand-edit, and it will silently break if the dump format ever changes.

Environment

• com.github.skydoves.compose.stability.analyzer plugin: 0.13.0
• Kotlin / Compose compiler plugin: 2.4.10
• Gradle: 9.5.0