conan-center-index VS steam-runtime

Conan is a package manager for C/C++. See: https://conan.io/.

The way it works is that you can provide "recipes", which are Python scripts, that automate the process of collecting source code (usually from a remote Git repository, or a remote source tarball), patching it, making its dependencies and transitive dependencies available, building for specific platform and architecture (via any number of build systems), then packaging up and serving binaries. There's a lot of complexity involved.

Here are the two recipes I mentioned:

libcurl: https://github.com/conan-io/conan-center-index/blob/master/r...

OpenSSL v3: https://github.com/conan-io/conan-center-index/blob/master/r...

Now, for the sake of this thread I want to highlight three things here:

- Conan recipes are usually made by people unaffiliated with the libraries they're packaging;

- The recipes are fully Turing-complete, do a lot of work, have their own bugs - therefore they should really be treated as software comonents themselves, for the purpose of OSS clearing/supply chain verification, except as far as I know, nobody does it;

- The recipes can, and do, patch source code and build scripts. There's supporting infrastruture for this built into Conan, and of course one can also do it by brute-force search and replace. See e.g. ZLib recipe that does it both at the same time:

https://github.com/conan-io/conan-center-index/blob/7b0ac710... -- `_patch_sources` does both direct search-and-replace in source files, and applies the patches from https://github.com/conan-io/conan-center-index/tree/master/r....

Now, good luck keeping track of what's going on there.

Just checkout ConanCenter https://conan.io/center it's free.

https://github.com/conan-io/conan-center-index there's 200+ PR that need reviewing :) we add community reviewers fairly often

As for ffmpeg it was last updated 10 days ago https://github.com/conan-io/conan-center-index/commits/master/recipes/ffmpeg/all :)

This is a more complicated recipe https://github.com/conan-io/conan-center-index/blob/master/recipes/pcapplusplus/all/conanfile.py

You can use the Conan package manager with prebuilt binaries/libraries

https://conan.io/center

It's available in Conan too https://github.com/conan-io/conan-center-index/tree/master/recipes/crowcpp-crow though it's not well maintained so no promises if it's working

You need something like https://conan.io/center/ to install the dependencies. You're lucky because it works well with CMake.

This post on github contains a list of packages supported by conan 2.0, its also kept up to date https://github.com/conan-io/conan-center-index/discussions/16196

Use a package manager: https://vcpkg.link/ https://conan.io/center/

> It turns out that unless the game is explicitly marked (by Valve reviewers), Steam Deck will use the Windows build + Proton even if a Linux version is available.

I found this which sounds like it's not the default, but is in fact a result of compatibility testing:

> If your game has gone through Steam Deck compatibility testing and the testers reported that the native Linux version didn't work (because of #579), then it might have been flagged to run the Windows binaries via Proton by default, instead of the native Linux version.

per https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-runtime/issues/585

> Where is it written that steam-run will magically execute most binaries without patching them?

Somewhere in here: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-runtime

:p

But I do get what you're saying. Once Flakes are default, I hope people start a proper push to clear up documentation and streamline the development process. The end-result is amazing, and the perfect OS/packaging system for my needs. The means of getting there... need a lot of work. I'm along for the ride either way.

I think they have something a bit like a container built into Steam: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-runtime

this is for steamworks API, my understanding is there's a separate SDK for consuming Linux dependencies like glibc. Like Soldier runtime, Sniper runtime, and so on. Am I wrong in thinking these are two separate SDKs? here's the link to the other SDK I'm talking about: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-runtime

I'm not sure we can distribute a flatpak or an appimage through Steam. They have their own controlled environment called Steam Runtime (https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-runtime) in which I should compile to be sure it runs everywhere (very similar to what I am doing). Last time, I look at this, it wasn't very clear and they supported only old versions of GCC. But it seems the documentation improved and now that I succeeded in building a modern version of GCC in my own container, maybe I could do that in theirs.

I believe it's usable outside of Steam: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-runtime though the instructions are not particularly clear. There's also a link to the APT repo they use as a reference: https://repo.steampowered.com/steamrt/

Looking at the Flatpak version, if you want to use Proton versions 5.13 or newer with Steam in Flatpak, you need to install Flatpak from backports https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-runtime/issues/294 . Using Flatpak saves having to install i386 if that matters to you.

> Game developers would be fine to target a single distro like Ubuntu 22.04.

Valve has its own container-only Linux distribution, called "Soldier Runtime" (https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-runtime); especially for games distributed on Steam, it probably makes more sense to target that distribution instead of Ubuntu.