Arch Linux team have announced a new direct collaboration with Valve (Steam).
Which is not too surprising.
Valve funds a lot of open source work and SteamOS (Steam Deck) is built directly on Arch Linux.
We are excited to announce that Arch Linux is entering into a direct collaboration with Valve. Valve is generously providing backing for two critical projects that will have a huge impact on our distribution: a build service infrastructure and a secure signing enclave. By supporting work on a freelance basis for these topics, Valve enables us to work on them without being limited solely by the free time of our volunteers.
This opportunity allows us to address some of the biggest outstanding challenges we have been facing for a while. The collaboration will speed-up the progress that would otherwise take much longer for us to achieve, and will ultimately unblock us from finally pursuing some of our planned endeavors. We are incredibly grateful for Valve to make this possible and for their explicit commitment to help and support Arch Linux.
These projects will follow our usual development and consensus-building workflows. [RFCs] will be created for any wide-ranging changes. Discussions on this mailing list as well as issue, milestone and epic planning in our GitLab will provide transparency and insight into the work. We believe this collaboration will greatly benefit Arch Linux, and are looking forward to share further development on this mailing list as work progresses.
Basically, the way packages are currently built / managed still requires a few manual interventions from Package Maintainers (e.g. triggering the build itself and signing the built packages afterwards). As of now, supporting multiple architectures would mean multiplying those manual steps by the number of supported / targeted architectures. With the current number of packages compared to the current number of (volunteers) Package Maintainers maintaining them, Arch is not able to handle the extra amount of effort that it would imply.
A central build service and a central secure signing enclave (the two projects concerned by that Valve "sponsoring") would streamline the overall process by allowing automated build and signing for packages without requiring any manual steps / interventions from Package Maintainers anymore (and it will also allow to increase the security of the process as a side benefit). Only such a streamlined / automated workflow would allow us to start working on supporting multiple architectures without implying to multiply the current amount of required effort.
In other words, those projects are prerequisites to start working on multiple architectures support in a clean & sane way, which is a end goal shared by both Arch and Valve.
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1fssfow/comment/lpne5p0/