Notes on Enhanced SMF Profile project
Project page on OpenSolaris:
http://opensolaris.org/os/project/smf-profiles/
Lastest Draft Design Spec: (05/02/2007)
http://opensolaris.org/os/project/smf-profiles/Design/
Features we need from the project
The feature in Enhanced SMF profile that's most useful for the Distro Constructor project is the "Layered Profile" support. With this feature, a base/generic profile can be defined. People can "stack" the few values they want to modify from the base profile on top. Artbitary level of stacking is allowed. This will be helpful for users of the Distro Constructor to build their image based on a known and working configuration with a few of their changes. Enhanced SMF will interpret this "stack" of profiles, and the properties can be access via its current libscf(3lib) or the svcprop(1) command. See Section 2.1.1 of the design spec for details.
Their schedule
The Enhanced SMF profile is still at design stage. They are not planning to complete coding until June 2008, the earliest.
Conclusion
Because the Enhanced SMF profile project's schedule doesn't meet the requirement of the Distro Constructor project's Spring 2008 release schedule, we will not be able to utilize its feature for the Spring 2008 release. Until the feature is available for us, we will define our manifest file in XML and use the XML parser in Python to get the values defined.