A bit of help with Salt, please?

[unman]

I’ve pretty much settled on enabling the top file for A, doing a qubesctl --targets A state.highstate, then disabling that top file and enabling the one for B.

Tedious indeed - try:

qubesctl --targets A state.apply STATE_A
qubesctl --targets B state.apply STATE_B

I’ve made a lot of progress on salt, but now I’m noticing a lot of repetitive code. Once I learned I could set a jinja variable at the top of the .sls file, it at least makes it easier to copy the sls files (create to make the thing, configure to install stuff on it–doesn’t apply to named DVMs or even, usually their templates) for one template, to another template. (Make the copy, alter two or three lines at the top, and maybe I need to change a label (color) in the middle of the file, but I could manage that too with a variable at the top.) But doing that forced me to realize that there’s a LOT of commonality between them. So I’m trying to figure out how to get Jinja to simply do a C-style include of some other file into an .sls. (I know that Jinja variables don’t seem to be retained in a salt included file, or I’d do that–salt includes have already cut down some redundancy.)

If you are deploying multiple states then templating is the way to go.
If you are offering a series of states for choice, not so much.

Another source of repetitiveness is that apparently I can’t do more than one file.managed or file.link in a single labeled state, so if I need to move four files, I need four states. If I need to make soft links to three of them, I need seven states. If I could at least combine the manage and link, I could cut it down some.

Combined -

multi-files:
  file.managed:
    - user: root
    - names:
      - /etc/one:
        - source: salt://1
      - /etc/two:
        - source: salt://2
      - /etc/three:
        - source: salt://3
    - order: 1

multi-links:
  file.symlink:
    - names:
      - /rw/config/one:
        - target: /etc/one
      - /rw/config/two:
        - target: /etc/two
      - /rw/config/three:
        - target: /etc/three
    - order: 2

Note use of - names: and - order: