PowerShell / PowerShell/DSC

Use a folder based manifest discovery vs PATH based manifest discovery

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Dominant language
Rust
Stars
523
Forks
75
Avg merge
3d 16h
Merged PRs (30d)
24

Description

Summary of the new feature / enhancement

The current documentation ( https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/dsc/resources/concepts/anatomy?view=dsc-3.0) appears to indicate that DSC will do manifest discovery on any valid path. I would recommend instead taking a page from Terraform's playbook and only do manifest discovery recursively from the calling folder. This has several benefits including: 1. Allows different teams to develop and run their manifests independently on the same build system, 2. Makes troubleshooting easier by limiting manifests to a known location, and 3. Potentially limits unknown or bad behavior if someone inadvertently leaves a manifest file in images or builds that is accessible from a PATH location.

Proposed technical implementation details (optional)
  1. Keep the DSC executable in the PATH so it can be called from the manifest location
  2. During configuration deployment, CD to the folder where the desired manifest file resides
  3. call DSC config from there

DSC will

  1. Recurse the folder and subfolders for manifest files
  2. Build it's graph of dependencies
  3. Build the resources from the discovered files.

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

Read the linked DSC anatomy documentation and inspect the DSC executable's current manifest-discovery entry point. Compare PATH-based discovery with the proposed calling-folder recursion, then determine how dependency graph and resource construction behave. Done means the discovery scope is defined and validated for nested manifests without unintended PATH-wide matches.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
rust
Domain
devops
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
30/100

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