Skip to content

Draft: launch-client(1): Expand documentation

Simon McVittie requested to merge wip/smcv/launch-client-1 into main

  • launch-client(1): Mention that several options need a D-Bus session bus

    Some highly unusual Linux distributions might not provide this.

  • launch-client(1): Describe communication outside containers, too

    s-r-launch-client was originally written to insert debugging commands into a per-game container, but it can equally well be used to escape from a per-game container and run commands outside. This mechanism should be used cautiously, because it relies on implementation details of the host system, but it's sometimes necessary for development and debugging.

  • launch-client(1): Consistently use $ prefix on example shell sessions

  • launch-client(1): Put a simple SLR 3.0 example first

    Now that SLR 3.0 is widely available, it makes sense to use it as our first example: it's the simplest, and both SLR 1.0 and Proton build on the foundation that the SLR 2.0 and 3.0 container runtimes provide.

  • launch-client(1): Describe SLR 1.0 as a special case of 2.0/3.0

  • launch-client(1): Move the gdbserver example up to the SLR 3.0 section

    Using gdbserver is a piece of complexity that is orthogonal to either SLR 1.0 or Proton.

  • launch-client(1): Clarify use of SRT_LAUNCHER_SERVICE_STOP_ON_EXIT

    It works with or without Proton.

/cc @refi64 @timo

This is a step towards steamrt/tasks#603. I haven't touched slr-for-game-developers.md yet, only the man-page-style documentation for s-r-launch-client.

One thing that I intentionally haven't done here is to add 3rd-level headings in the EXAMPLES → Inserting debugging commands into a container section. I did try having 3rd-level headings like "Steam Linux Runtime 3.0" and "Proton", but they render really confusingly when converted to a man page (they're indistinguishable from 2nd-level), and I'm not convinced they're necessary: I think the examples work OK as one continuous narrative.

Merge request reports