I’ve spent the last month on that repo, studying it religiously. You’ve done really well with it.
They’re simple once you figure it out 
Qubes OS “Qube Maker”
Template Builder
Salt Script Generator
Automatic Provisioner
Imagine the “Create new Qube…” GUI dialog box, but with a few extra widgets at the bottom:
- Something like the current “Qube Settings…” dialog box, but with a few additions
- Users could select from a list what packages they’d like installed in their Qube
- Standard distribution repos
- The Qubes OS repo
- Users could potentially put in the path to custom repos (or even DEB/RPM/ZST/eBuild packages) to add to the list
- Any package not in the standard repos (maybe the actual maintainer’s repo is a few versions ahead of the distro repo)
- Sysadmins/software devs could include their own bespoke packages (corporate internal software, etc.)
- Users could specify additional things like:
- Custom config files
- Anything else that Salt scripts let you do (assuming a decent enough UI can be made for it, and I’ll do my best)
- Users have the option to:
- Build a template/Qube based on that config
- Build Salt scripts based off Salt templates, based on that config
- Both
Why do this?
- It allows anyone to provision custom AppVMs (they might be based on predefined Salt templates, but that would still be enough for most people)
- AND share them with the community!
- AND share them with the community!
- Would be a massive time-saver for sysadmins in provisioning work machines
- Instead of “I created this awesome Qube, you should try it, here’s the entire 15GB template backup”, it becomes “I’ve created this awesome Qube, you should try it, here are the 400KB Salt configs”
- Allows for more transparency when the community shares their customised AppVMs/Templates
- Would likely be easier to use for more demographics than manually typing them out (journalists and HRDs and their bosses is a good example)
- Could potentially even be as simple as cloning the “Qube Settings…” dialog box and reconnecting the widgets to a backend that generates Salt scripts
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I’ll do up a UI and post it to show you what I’ve got in mind
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Here’s an example of my first try at making Salt files:
Yes, they’re probably a bit cringe, but this is likely the end result if a regular user could be bothered to give it a go….
A GUI tool to auto-generate these based on pre-made Salt templates would go a long way in making Salt in Qubes OS “accessible to the masses”.
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That was what I was struggling with. Thank you!
That’s what I have been doing.
I will once I get up to speed on that actual directory structure. I’m getting there….
Thats what I’ve been basing the scripts off.
That explains a lot. Thank you!
It’s very powerful, but requires a lot of text-based config, which puts it beyond the point where a lot of regular Qubes users would go “Nah, couldn’t be bothered….No GUI tool….Too difficult….”