PowerShell / PowerShell/DSC

Resource manifest metadata for parallel execution safety

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Issue-Enhancement Needs Triage
Dominant language
Rust
Stars
523
Forks
75
Avg merge
3d 16h
Merged PRs (30d)
24

Description

Summary of the new feature / enhancement

Introduce a field in the DSC resource manifest that allows a resource author to declare whether multiple instances of the same resource can be safely executed concurrently.

This is an advisory signal only and does not change DSC engine behavior.


Motivation

During discussion of parallel execution (see #42), we agreed that:

  • The DSC engine should remain deterministic and sequential
  • Parallel orchestration is the responsibility of higher-order tools
  • However, higher-order tools need signals from resource authors to make safe decisions

Today, there is no standard way for a resource to indicate whether it is safe to run concurrently with other instances of itself.


Proposal

Add a field to the resource manifest, for example:

{
  "capabilities": {
    "parallelSafe": true
  }
}

### Proposed technical implementation details (optional)

_No response_

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

No files or tests are named. Start by locating the resource manifest definition, parsing, and validation tests, then trace how manifest metadata is exposed to higher-order tools. Done means the manifest accepts and preserves an advisory parallel-safety field without changing DSC engine execution behavior, with coverage for the new metadata.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
rust
Domain
devops
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Quiet
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
52/100

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