Puppet

Quote From Luke on puppet-dev in thread "Composite resource identifier".

http://groups.google.com/group/puppet-dev/browse_thread/thread/30fe5694ca9a39dd?fwc=1

Yeah, composite keys are the way to go, and I think we're actually at  
the point (at least, in the master branch) where this is approachable.

Previously, we had lots of code that was responsible for determining  
resource uniqueness, but it's essentially all been consolidated into  
the Catalog class.

We'd likely still require unique titles, but it should be possible to,  
um, make it possible to define resource types with multiple namevars.   
Thus, any combination of namevars would have to be unique, but no  
single value would be unique.

The reason you'd still probably want unique titles is so you could do  
relationships; e.g., Key[foo] works, but how would you do composite  
keys?  Key[foo; comment => bar]?  That would suck.

I suppose the unique titles could be optional -- you'd only need them  
if you were specifying relationships.

It'd be a bit problematic, though, in that Puppet uses this resource  
reference syntax a lot.  Maybe have the namevars always in a specific  
order, and do something like Foo[key/other/bar]?

In other words, this is technically feasible now, but we need an  
appropriate internal design and an appropriate syntax to go with it.