Bug#992533: steam: Does not work on 32-bit (i386) systems

[Simon McVittie]

Control: retitle -1 steam: Does not work on 32-bit (i386) systems
Control: tags -1 + upstream wontfix

On Thu, 19 Aug 2021 at 21:27:30 +0200, Nicolas Patrois wrote:
> I can launch Steam (use and see the window) but I can’t open the navigator
> inside it.

Steam requires a 64-bit operating system and a 64-bit CPU. It is installable
on 32-bit (i386) Debian for historical reasons, but Valve do not support
32-bit installations any more.

Very old versions did work on purely 32-bit systems, but Steam
auto-updates, so it is not possible to run an old version. This is
outside Debian's control.

For newer versions, we need to keep steam as an i386 package for now,
so that it can pull in i386 dependencies on an amd64 system.

I want to do some restructuring of the Steam package that would make it
correctly not be installable on pure i386 systems, and make it install
64-bit dependencies more reliably, but that's going to require some
work behind the scenes (we have to dot every i and cross every t in
terms of licensing before going through the NEW queue to add additional
binary packages).

    smcv