One can create types with multiple keyattributes by using isnamevar multiple times. (Example: Port in /etc/services with the keyattributes name and protocol).

Unfortunately prefetching of these types is broken in transaction.rb

def prefetch
  prefetchers = {}
  @catalog.vertices.each do |resource|
    if provider = resource.provider and provider.class.respond_to?(:prefetch)
      prefetchers[provider.class] ||= {}
      prefetchers[provider.class][resource.name] = resource
    end
  end
  [...]
end

Because resource.name is not uniq anymore we will eventually overwrite existing resources in the prefetch-hash and thus not all resources are passed to the prefetch method of the underlying provider. So if the user defined the following manifest:

port { 'telnet:tcp': name => 'telnet', protocol => 'tcp', number => '23'}
port { 'telnet:udp': name => 'telnet', protocol => 'udp', number => '23'}

The providers defined def self.prefetch(resources) will only get resources['telnet'] = <second resource with protocol udp>

I have the following suggestions:

• use resource.uniqueness_key instead of resource.name. uniqueness_key is an array of all the key_attributes. This can only work if you can reliably use arrays as hashkeys. I don’t know if thats true for all ruby versions. This solution will probably break every existing provider who uses prefetch
• same as firstone except use uniqueness_key[0].intern if we only have one keyattribute. This solution will hopefully not break existing providers
• use prefetchers[provider.class][resource.name] << resource so we will not overwrite but build an array if name is not uniq.
• build a nested hash, so in my port example we whould get prefetchers[provider.class][resource[:name]][resource[:protocol]]