How to best handle custom installation paths

[travispaul]

I need to install most packages (aside from salt itself) into the path D:\Program Files to achieve this I have used a custom grain called program_files in my package sls files:

nodejs:
  '5.7.1':
    full_name: Node.js
    installer: 'https://nodejs.org/dist/v5.7.1/node-v5.7.1-x64.msi'
    install_flags: 'INSTALLDIR="{{ grains['program_files'] }}\\Node.js" /qb'
    msiexec: True
    locale: en_US
    reboot: False

But using the grain in this fashion requires me to fork any packages that I want to change and prevents me from sharing these packages upstream. Is there a better way to override the installation path? I experimented with using the environ state to override the %ProgramFiles% environment variable without any success.

[rickh563]

ZD-689

[TheBigBear]

@rickh563 not sure what ZD-689 means, but this and similar winrepo-ng improvements should be possible without any changes required? Just using jinja2 power and syntax in combination with salt environments and pillar lookup properly, right?
other places would be here #398 and here #350 and here #144 ?

[twangboy]

@TheBigBear ZD numbers reference our internal tracking system for enterprise customers.