qapi: Document introspection stability considerations

We are not ready (and might never be ready) to declare
introspection stable between releases. Clients written to
control multiple versions of qemu, and desiring to know
whether a particular member is supported for a given
command, must be prepared to locate that member in spite
of qapi changes that may affect the member's location or
type within the overall object, even though such changes
did not break QMP wire back-compatibility.

Signed-off-by: Eric Blake <eblake@redhat.com>
Message-Id: <1447264202-19554-1-git-send-email-eblake@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Markus Armbruster <armbru@redhat.com>

1 files changed, 9 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/qapi/introspect.json b/qapi/introspect.json
index e7c4c3e..9e9369e 100644
--- a/qapi/introspect.json
+++ b/qapi/introspect.json
@@ -22,6 +22,15 @@
 # what's there), not interface specification.  The specification is in
 # the QAPI schema.
 #
+# Furthermore, while we strive to keep the QMP wire format
+# backwards-compatible across qemu versions, the introspection output
+# is not guaranteed to have the same stability.  For example, one
+# version of qemu may list an object member as an optional
+# non-variant, while another lists the same member only through the
+# object's variants; or the type of a member may change from a generic
+# string into a specific enum or from one specific type into an
+# alternate that includes the original type alongside something else.
+#
 # Returns: array of @SchemaInfo, where each element describes an
 # entity in the ABI: command, event, type, ...
 #