bahamat: SMF properties are actually a pretty great mechanism for declarative configuration. If you're using some configuration management platform it really just needs a way to interact with libscf, which gives you a typed key value store with transactions.

You get things for free then, like "do I need to restart this service to get the new properties in there or have I already done that"

I think the mistake is people usually try to do it in shell

When really you want a program that more directly diffs and interacts with the repository

and the snapshots and transactions and so on

saltstack at least use to have some svcs manipelation options

(because I added it wrapping around svccfg and svcadm)

I stopt using salt so not sure it still exists