I recently switched from puppet daemon to mcollective commander : it kicks the “stuck in outer space puppet daemon” feature out of the way and brings me nice features (as load control).
On my Solaris machines at $WORK I use iMil‘s pkgin to install additional software. But until today, I add to do it by hand, on every machine… Not really what I like to do after a little more than a year using puppet.
Disclaimer : this work is mostly based upon DavidS work, available on his git repo. In the scope of my work I needed to have munin support for freeBSD & Solaris.