While I haven't seen it noted in any of the recent changelogs for the Steam Client Beta, it seems it has an updated Steam Runtime in need of some testing.
Sending word to us on Twitter, developer Timothee Besset said:
The beta branch of the steam client for GNU/Linux has received several updates to it's runtime for games. Make sure to test your favorite titles! CC @gamingonlinux @Plagman2
For those of you who want to ensure everyone has a good experience and to ensure games you love don't break with a new stable Steam Client release, it's time to get testing and reporting. It's probably a good idea to let Valve know of any issues on their Steam for Linux GitHub.
What is the Steam Runtime? From the GitHub:
A binary compatible runtime environment for Steam applications on Linux.
Essentially, it includes a set of libraries for game developers to link their games against. This is to give them a somewhat standard set of libs that should work across distributions for games shipped on Steam.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Quoting: devnullDepends which bugs you're refering to but they were certainly known, maybe not as public.
I can obviously only speak of public disclosure of these bugs, for example POODLE was disclosed 2014: https://access.redhat.com/articles/1232123
Whether it was known in 2009, I don't know. At least us server admins/app devs did not know until that point.
Quoting: devnullDo you know how TLS1.3 works? It's not a silver bullet and there was nothing stopping applications from enforcing security policy. I know because it's one of the first things I do on installs.
Agree, no security protocol will ever be perfect - but that doesn't mean we should just leave old broken protocols enabled. Yes you can take steps to mitigate things like POODLE or BEAST, but for example in the case of POODLE both server AND client have to be patched - just ensuring your local app policy is half the work.
Also SSLv3 client applications tend to be older and use weaker ciphers.
Quoting: devnullI don't follow this at all for the simple fact I updated libgnutls to my own distro's "latest", and STILL have problems. While the steam runtime may be old, requiring bleeding edge rolling releases is ... assinine.
The issue with COMPILING TLS have NOTHING to do with Steam. What on Earth. Do you know what other dependencies that involves?
I have no idea what your distro's latest version is, so can't comment on that. It is of course possible GnuTLS has bugs of it's own making connections fail.
I don't think understand you last sentence - as an app dev you ARE responsible of keeping your dependencies up to date. Steam-runtime or not. Problem is, if developers only target the runtime, they will get outdated dependencies.
Quoting: devnullThat is IMPOSSIBLE. The whole reason code uses third party libs for things like SSL (collectively refering to all things "Secure this connection between two points") - is not worrying about it breaking.
Well it's not impossible - but time consuming. A full-time job in itself for many applications. I agree 100% though that security-related libraries should not break API, unless there is REALLY REALLY no other way (or a completely new protocol that can't be represented with the current API).
In fact, any library not breaking API would be nice - but this is hard to do in itself. Sometimes conserving an old API is a great source of hold-back for a library.
I recently linked GnuTLS 3.0 to Proton that was compiled against GnuTLS 2.6, and things do work now, in many games. So I think at least the developers did try to conserve the API as much as possible in this specific case.
Quoting: liamdaweWas sent this about the update: https://gist.github.com/TTimo/b931f11bacbdba22d3ef8532caa96952
Don't know if I'm misreading something here (not very found of git being a svn type of guy) but the list there seams to be very minor changes in revision only.
E.g gcc-4.6-base_4.6.3-1ubuntu5+srt5 in Steam Generally Available runtime is to be replaced by 4.6.3-1ubuntu5+steamrt1.1+srt1 from Steam Public Beta runtime
So still v4.6.3 and still with the Ubuntu revision 5 but with +steamrt1.1+srt1 and this is similar for everything on the list.
Last edited by F.Ultra on 26 October 2018 at 11:13 pm UTC
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