Feature Request - steam-runtime-minimal

[Tele42]

This is effectively a rehash other steam-runtime compatibility issues. Hypothetically, what if a second, minimalistic steam runtime were introduced along with a companion meta-package to have the distro (Ubuntu 16.04 or newer) pull in the distro's variant of the dependencies.

The companion meta-package's sole purpose is to pull all dependencies that make up the steam runtime, either 32-bit only or 64-bit / 32-bit multilib. The 32-bit only variant is optional at this point. Non-target distributions can adapt it to their packaging method.

The minimalistic steam runtime should include only the hard-to-acquire packages like parts of ffmpeg and libglew-1.6 which are known to not keep a stable ABI. Another restriction is that there will be no ABI compatibility for experimental C++ features before they are stabilized in upstream gcc. In the long term, this is better than game developers shipping their own C++ libraries when interaction with mesa and other system libraries is expected. This will allow game developers to freely use newer C++ specs on newer distros, where the newer system variant of libstdc++ has locked in ABI compatibility. If that compatibility breaks in the future, then it is an upstream bug, and should get fixed upstream anyway.

Additionally, any system that would use this minimalistic steam runtime and does not have all the dependencies as tracked in the companion meta-package effectively forfeits support from Valve and/or individual game developers.

In the wild, this should allow package maintainers for distributions like Ubuntu to provide a more stable and reliable experience for their end users on the same day that there is a new 6 month release. Also, this accommodation should prevent most of the issues we are seeing with rolling release distributions over time.

Likely selected with a non-default STEAM_RUNTIME=minimal.

Note: this is not a request to discontinue the current steam runtime, just a possible way to progressively move forward without a revolutionary overhaul.