Updates to the Steam package

slaanesh Fedora, RHEL, Steam

I’ve reviewed and updated the steam package to be noarch and no longer i686. As some of you are aware, since a few releases, the client is fully 64 bit, including supporting libraries, and it just ships some libraries and components for the integration on the 32 bit games (Steam overlay, etc.). This does not make 32 bit support optional, it’s still required to actually start the client.

As part of the change, I’ve also reviewed all the libraries and binaries that are required and the libraries that can be overridden. For those of you that are not aware, it works roughly like this:

  • libc.so.6/libdrm.so.2/libGL.so.1/libnsl.so.1 are the only real required libraries for installing on i686 and x8_64.
  • The rest can be considered “improvements” (additional hardware options compiled in specifically for Fedora, graphics drivers, specific distribution bugfixes, etc. – the list is quite long). Steam prefers the local libraries if available.
  • Some libraries are hardcoded (“pinned”) to be consumed only from the Steam Runtime, so even having those installed does not make any difference.

Long story short, I cross checked everything and I’ve revamped the SPEC file to be x86_64 centric with some i686 libraries pulled in as a dependency where it makes sense.

The SPEC file is smaller and tidier. Also for reasons I don’t understand, I can have the noarch package upgrade over i686, but not the same behaviour with x86_64 on i686. Anyway I think it makes more sense to have it noarch for the coming aarch64 variant or the steamrt3c runtime becoming the default.

This is how it will look like:

$ sudo dnf update steam
Updating and loading repositories:
Repositories loaded.
Package               Arch    Version              Repository      Size
Upgrading:
 steam                noarch  0:1.0.0.85-7.fc44    fedora-steam    19.4 MiB
   replacing steam    i686    0:1.0.0.85-6.fc44    fedora-steam    19.4 MiB

Transaction Summary:
 Upgrading:          1 package
 Replacing:          1 package

Total size of inbound packages is 19 MiB. Need to download 19 MiB.
After this operation, 0 B extra will be used (install 19 MiB, remove 19 MiB).
Is this ok [y/N]:

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