possible fix for https://github.com/saltstack/salt/issues/5567

WARNING: NOT SAFE FOR BLIND MERGE - INFORMATIVE ONLY.

As discussed in https://github.com/saltstack/salt/issues/5567 .

The unittests did not pass cleanly, although it's difficult to tell if the failures are related to any of the changes that I did. I am also having massive problems getting debian packages to work correctly now (salt user doesn't seem to get created anymore), which is making testing difficult.

This fixed the problem for me, but as discussed in #5567, it needs a design decision from core dev.