Remote Desktop Client for Microsoft outdated

[BoomEarth]

Hello,

I've noticed the remote desktop client hasn't been outdated for about 2 months now and would like to update it myself by submitting a manifest. However, the current manifest lists a download URL to that specific version (the old one). The URL I found that points to the updated version (in fact, dynamically speaking, all future versions) is found here by inspecting the link for the x64 client.

1. If I use that link in the manifest, the hash will become outdated the next time Microsoft pushes an update to this program (which is fairly often). There'll be a version mismatch as well.

2. What's the policy here? Create the manifest, use that new link to download the installer, verify the (current) msi package and jot down the hash and package ID and the version, do a pull request and then ride it out until the manifest becomes invalid and I, or someone, uploads an updated manifest?

3. Due to the nature of how quickly Microsoft updates this program, I would prefer if there was an automated solution to this. Are there any guidelines I could follow in maybe exploring automation?

Or, if I'm off my mark entirely, any advice would be welcome. Thank you.

[jedieaston]

1. You could use the link that link redirects to, so we can keep older versions of the client in the repo. And then the hash would always be correct for that specific version.

2. You have it right. I don't know how this one was missed.

3. As long as your automation opens a PR, it's fine. If you use that link that always points to the latest version, wingetbot would automatically update it within a few days of the hash mismatch (if someone doesn't catch it sooner. a few days is a long time!)

[vedantmgoyal9]

@jedieaston please don't mind, but can you tell how many scripts you have? I think you have made scripts for literally everything.

[jedieaston]

I probably have four I use for automated updates of things that have decent APIs available (JetBrains, Jackett, Edge, Visual Studio). And I wrote myself a little Discord bot for fun that scrapes GitHub and a couple other sites every few hours to see if there are updates available, which I then just use my duct-taped together PowerShell library to update manually. I write one-off scripts all the time to do bulk metadata changes.

The PowerShell library was nice, but I'm playing around with rewriting it with something that supports the JSON schemas that are provided in winget-cli so I don't have to manually write out the field names every time I want to do something that isn't an update. I have a prototype working in Python, but there's probably not anything worth making public yet.

[denelon]

@BoomEarth take a look at https://github.com/microsoft/winget-create. We have a tool developed to help create manifests. It can even submit the PR.

[vedantmgoyal9]

[...] that have decent APIs available (JetBrains, Jackett, Edge, Visual Studio).

@jedieaston Can you share links to the API documentation or how you use it? I am interested in learning that how they work. Also, if you can share the source code of your Discord Bot, it will be very helpful in making some part of my script?

[jedieaston]

I'll try to clean up my scripts when I have a mo, but in the meantime inspiration can be found here: https://github.com/aaronparker/evergreen/. I didn't use this when building mine (which is why they're hacky) but the maintainer over there has built tons of automated infrastructure to update packages (including a sample script to generate winget manifests, although that was pre wingetcreate).