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Commit 41ac7a82 authored by Simon McVittie's avatar Simon McVittie
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Distinguish between the Steam installation (root) and data paths


Until now we've been conflating these two, but Timothee Besset recently
clarified their status for me.

~/.steam/steam is maintained by bin_steam.sh, aka /usr/bin/steam,
in which it is referred to as STEAMDATALINK. It is the data directory
containing user data (cloud-synced configuration and saves), the
download cache, and the default Steam Library directory.

~/.steam/root is maintained by steam.sh, in which it is referred to as
STEAMROOTLINK. It is the installation directory, containing Steam
executables and libraries.

As a result, they are normally the same, but can differ, in particular
in two situations:

* When testing a new Steam client build by running client/steam.sh,
  client/ gets used as the installation directory, in conjunction with
  the existing data directory pointed to by ~/.steam/steam. This avoids
  having to re-login or re-download your library of games for the new
  test installation.

* When Debian bug #916303 was present during the initial Steam
  installation, the Steam client was unpacked into ~/.steam, resulting
  in creation of ~/.steam/steam as a real directory that cannot be
  replaced with a symbolic link. We effectively ended up using
  ~/.steam as the installation path, but with ~/.steam/steam as the
  data path. (The Debian steam package has since been fixed, but we
  cannot easily disentangle existing installations.)

Signed-off-by: default avatarSimon McVittie <smcv@collabora.com>
parent 0969843c
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