Dear Maintainer,

It looks like the udev rules in steam-devices are outdated. On two
separate systems, this meant that the Steam client lacked the necessary
permissions (I guess?) to complete the firmware upgrade upon first use
of the device.

The Steam client doesn't clearly show what's going wrong, and the only
thing I could find out by myself were cryptic error messages about pidns
from xdg-desktop-portal in the logs. Steam Support helpfully pointed me
to a GitHub issue thread [1], where some custom udev rules helped me to
work around the issue.

[1] https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/13171

Upon closer inspection, the udev rules in steam-devices are outdated,
and it seems that the upstream udev rules may have prevented these
issues. Could you please update the package?

Kind regards,
Stijn van Drongelen

Not instantaneously, especially in stable releases. I'll add it to my
queue, but my queue is not short, so please be patient.

     smcv

I believe the relevant change here might have been
<https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-devices/pull/68/changes>.

If you revert the more specific workarounds from the Github issue, and
instead apply that change, is the Steam Controller firmware update
functionality still available?

They are up-to-date in testing/unstable, but stable releases don't
normally have the latest releases of everything, and I will have to
justify the changes to the stable release managers to be allowed to
update this package.

     smcv

Hello,

Bug #1153772 in steam-installer reported by you has been fixed in the
Git repository and is awaiting an upload. You can see the commit
message below and you can check the diff of the fix at:

https://salsa.debian.org/games-team/steam-installer/-/commit/de2841e68fc019dd473292cbb4abcdd0c235fd2b
------------------------------------------------------------------------
d/patches: Update steam-devices to match v1.0.0.87 upstream

(Closes: #1139216)

- Set permissions on all sub-devices of all Valve USB devices,
  not just the USB device itself, in particular allowing
  Steam Controller (2026) firmware updates (Closes: #1153772)
- Enable wake-on-USB for all Valve devices
- Don't treat non-Valve devices as Valve devices if their product ID
  happens to match Valve's vendor ID
- Fix raw HID access to Valve devices with no associated input node
- Allow active logged-in local users to access many additional gamepads
  via raw HID
- Allow active logged-in local users to access several additional
  VR devices via raw HID
------------------------------------------------------------------------

(this message was generated automatically)
-- 
Greetings

https://bugs.debian.org/1153772

I've prepared a proposed backport to Debian 13 of the udev rules for
steam-devices. Here is a test-build (source and amd64+i386 binaries):
https://people.debian.org/~smcv/13.8/steam-installer/

Please try that on a Debian 13 system? Having test results from someone
with the Steam Controller (2026) hardware will make it more likely that
the stable release managers will allow this update.

Note that if you rebuild from source, you'll only be able to upgrade the
steam-libs packages if you build both amd64 and i386 packages, something
like this:

dpkg-buildpackage -b
dpkg-buildpackage -B -ai386

     smcv