Looks like this was indeed the case. I have now edited your post and replaced the issue. I’ll flag this on meta.discourse.org. I guess their parser only cares about what it thinks is a character separator. In this case the ----- in salt output seems to cause the error.
Thank you @unman, I added - match: nodegroup and it worked.
I’m new to salt and qubes, I followed in a bit chaotic manner the documentation and excellent setp-by-setp available (linked from the forum), but it got me to the following warnings (I might have skipped some initial config):
1. not able to run qubesctl without sudo
# qubesctl top.enabled
[WARNING ] Failed to open log file, do you have permission to write to /var/log/salt/minion?
[CRITICAL] Specified ext_pillar interface qvm_prefs is unavailable
Cannot write to process directory. Do you have permission to write to /var/cache/salt/minion/proc/20231220091327803815 ?
DOM0 configuration failed, not continuing
2. always get warning on top_file_merging_strategy
# sudo qubesctl state.highstate # or state.apply
[WARNING ] top_file_merging_strategy is set to 'merge' and multiple top files were found. Merging order is not deterministic, it may be desirable to either set top_file_merging_strategy to 'same' or use the 'env_order' configuration parameter to specify the merging order.
local:
...