Module record 

The one non-secret file this feature writes on the Windows side: a record per managed WSL distribution.

It is advisory, and being advisory is what makes it safe

02-target-architecture.md is explicit: “the record is advisory: status verifies actual WSL/service state and reports drift. A missing record never licenses deletion inside a distribution.” Everything in the shape of this type follows from that sentence.

Nothing here is a source of truth about the distribution. wsl status asks WSL whether the distribution is there, asks the Linux service whether it is healthy, and asks Task Scheduler whether the task exists; the record only says “this workstation believes it manages this one, and here is what it last installed”. So a record that is stale, hand-edited, or absent degrades a status line and can never cause a deletion.

What it may not contain

03-security-and-lifecycle.md item 3 lists provider records among the places the credential document must be absent from, and 02-target-architecture.md adds GitHub JIT configuration and repository policies. Two things enforce that rather than one:

• the struct has five fields and none of them could hold a secret; and
• it is #[serde(deny_unknown_fields)], so a document that grew a token key — by a hand edit, or by a future version writing one — fails to parse instead of being read and re-written.

The second is the one that matters over time. A field nobody added cannot leak; a field somebody adds later is caught by a_record_carrying_a_credential_field_is_refused_rather_than_ignored.

Schema version

PROVIDER_RECORD_SCHEMA_VERSION is written and checked. A record from a newer version is refused rather than read on a best-effort basis: this product supports downgrades through update, and a 0.4 binary silently half-reading a 0.5 record — then rewriting it, dropping whatever it did not understand — is how the newer install loses state.

Structs

WslProviderRecord

One managed WSL distribution, as this workstation last saw it.

Constants

PROVIDER_RECORD_DIR

The directory, under the config directory, that holds the records.

PROVIDER_RECORD_SCHEMA_VERSION

The schema this version writes and is willing to read.