openSUSE admin

wild, untested guess: swap the "profile.zypper.packages" and "profile.zypper.repositories" includes in salt/profile/zypper/init.sls
(and ideally first merge my changes to move around that file to avoid merge conflicts later ;-)

I don't know if anything in salt/role/base.sls installs packages, but if so, you should also move the "profile.zypper" include to the first position there.

this is not a sufficient solution, packages and repositories might get installed in a formula as well. I want to ensure that salt will call all pkgrepo resources before it calls any pkg resource

Correct me if I'm wrong, but AFAIK formulas need to be include'd in salt/role/*.sls - and this would mean that making "profile.zypper" the first item in salt/role/base.sls should work.

That said - yes, a formula could add a repo, but a) that would (hopefully) be specific to that formula and get added before installing packages from it and b) I don't like the idea too much to drop in random repos with a formula - there's a reason we have openSUSE:infrastructure + subprojects. (In other words: formulas should not add any repos IMHO.)

you are overthinking it. I was just setting up an example to get you understand that pkgrepo needs to be called always before pkg.install. Puppet provides such a mechanism, where it collects all the equivalent pkgrepo resources and calls them before anything else on the system.

Niels, is this something you can answer? ;-)

saltstack-formulas are regarded as single solutions for the service/package/config it should manage.
so if a formula installs a package from a repo, it should do something along the folowing line:

• provide a way to install the repo and refresh it.
• install the package after installing the repo.

or the you can do the following,

• formula to manage all repo's and refresh the repo's after something changes. (first rep in top.sls
• formula to install a pkg always after the formula that manage repos

Saltstack doesn't have the ability to change a module on a global scale, only per sls file.
you can override stuff or extend stuff per sls file.

pkg options:
https://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/ref/states/all/salt.states.pkg.html#salt.states.pkg.installed

extend stuff
https://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/ref/states/extend.html

Hopefully this will help with building formulas