Bug#891613: steam: Steam update suddenly depends on full nvidia graphic support regardless of equipment

[Simon McVittie]

Control: retitle -1 steam: Should not install NVIDIA drivers by default
Control: severity -1 wishlist

On Mon, 26 Feb 2018 at 23:54:16 -0500, Main Account wrote:
> My system uses AMD graphics and while X installs a variety of other drivers, it
> is not that demanding of storage. Steam only adds nvidia support, but with the
> new edition it *requires* nvidia support whether needed or not.

Steam does not require the i386 NVIDIA drivers, it only Recommends them
(which means they are installed by default, which might indeed be
considered excessive, but is not a hard dependency). See
https://bugs.debian.org/839592 for previous discussion of this.

apt does not provide any way to express a dependency relationship like
"Steam depends on nvidia-driver-libs-i386, but only if nvidia-driver
is installed" or "Steam depends on nvidia-driver-libs-i386, but only if
NVIDIA hardware is detected". If it did, then that dependency would be
appropriate, but since that's impossible, we need some sort of compromise.

    smcv