[Request] VMware Workstation Pro

[bigbenzh]

Package Request

Criteria

For a package to be acceptable in the Nonportable bucket, it should be:

• a reasonably well-known and widely used application
• the latest stable version of the program
• the full version i.e. not a trial version

Information

Name: VMware Workstation Pro

Description: VMware Workstation Pro is a popular virtualization software for Windows x64 system. This Nonportable Scoop bucket contains it's free version named VMware Workstation Player. Starting in May 2024, VMware Workstation Pro begin free for personal use and VMware Workstation Player is discontinued.

Homepage: [a URL/link]

Download link(s): https://support.broadcom.com/group/ecx/downloads (requires login) or vmware's update repository https://softwareupdate.vmware.com/cds/vmw-desktop/ws/

Some indication of popularity/repute: Emmm... You must have heard it.

[Sn0wCrack]

Homebrew handles getting the version via a different XML file that is a manifest of all releases: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-cask/blob/master/Casks/v/vmware-fusion.rb#L10

The Workstation Windows equivalent is here: https://softwareupdate.vmware.com/cds/vmw-desktop/ws-windows.xml

Annoyingly it does require multiple versions, a primary semver style version and a another number.

I'm unsure if scoop supports this style of versioning required, there isn't often another release under the same exact version number. Can maybe fudge this as "17.6.0-24238078" if it's supported?

Full URL for the latest release as an example: https://softwareupdate.vmware.com/cds/vmw-desktop/ws/17.6.0/24238078/windows/core/VMware-workstation-17.6.0-24238078.exe.tar

Looking at existing scoop packages I've found this one seems to line up with what might need to be done: https://github.com/ScoopInstaller/Nonportable/blob/master/bucket/hp-support-assistant-np.json#L25-L37

[Sn0wCrack]

I've made a brief attempt at this. One issue I'm facing is with how checkver functions.

VMware publishes an XML file with all the versions, but they're unfortunately not sorted in any particular order. checkver doesn't actually bother sorting the versions found by the regex check, it simply has a forward or backwards look up option, so finding the latest version isn't easily possible.

[bigbenzh]

One issue I'm facing is with how checkver functions.

pull requests #308 seems to have a solution (but why it's not merged?)

I also found a very dirty walk around to get the latest version number using System.Version class

$userAgent = 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/103.0.0.0 Safari/537.36'
$XML_CONTENT = (Invoke-WebRequest 'https://softwareupdate.vmware.com/cds/vmw-desktop/ws-windows.xml' -UserAgent $userAgent).Content
$re = New-Object System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex("(\d+)?\.(\d+)?\.(\d+)")
$ver = $re.Matches($XML_CONTENT).Value | %{ new-object System.Version ($_) } | sort | select -last 1
$ver.ToString()

ref
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/82064/a-regex-for-version-number-parsing
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/711107/sorting-powershell-versions

[breadgrocery]

$xmlData = Invoke-RestMethod -Uri "https://softwareupdate.vmware.com/cds/vmw-desktop/ws-windows.xml"
$latest = $xmlData.metaList.metadata | Sort-Object { [version]$_."version" } -Descending | Select-Object -First 1

# Extract version and build
$ver = $latest | Select-Object -ExpandProperty version
$build = $latest | Select-Object -ExpandProperty url | Where-Object { $_ -match '/(\d+)/windows' } | ForEach-Object { $matches[1] }

# Final download url
$url = "https://softwareupdate.vmware.com/cds/vmw-desktop/ws/$ver/$build/windows/core/VMware-workstation-$ver-$build.exe.tar"

[brian6932]

I do have (and had for a long time) the manifest on my own personal bucket, if it doesn't get merged, you can just use it by adding the bucket.
https://github.com/brian6932/dank-scoop/blob/master/bucket/vmware-workstation-pro-np.json