Should work with .sh files

[koppor]

I want to use JetBrains' EP versions of their products. Link: https://www.jetbrains.com/resources/eap/. They deliver a .tar.gz file, which contains bin/idea.sh. When starting nix-alien with that, the result is:

err:
	not a dynamic executable

This error message is very correct. In the end, that script executes jbr/bin/java, which outputs

jbr/bin/java: You are trying to run an unpatched binary on nixos, but you have not configured NIX_LD or NIX_LD_x86_64-linux. See https://github.com/Mic92/nix-ld for more details

Executing that works:

nix --extra-experimental-features "nix-command flakes" run github:thiagokokada/nix-alien -- jbr/bin/java

But it misses the output:

Usage: java [options] <mainclass> [args...]
           (to execute a class)

When using sh -x, I can see the parameters which need to be passed to java. Then, I use nix-alien, but that misses libXext.so.6 somehow:

kotlinx.coroutines.JobCancellationException: Parent job is Cancelling; job=UndispatchedCoroutine{Cancelling}@61f6e43e

Caused by: java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: /home/koppor/idea-IU-233.13135.103/jbr/lib/libawt_xawt.so: libXext.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

---

I wished, I could use nix-alien together with an sh file and that nix-alien "just" runs the script and if a binary is executed, that binary is executed using nix-alien.

I know, that could maybe not solve my issue as nix-alien won't fix the Java runtime behavior to look for shared libraries and throw an exception if not found.

[thiagokokada]

Nothing we can do.

Analyzing dependencies inside scripting languages (not just Shell, also things like Python, Ruby, Lua, etc.) is basically impossible since we would need to have a deep understanding on each language (e.g.: knowing that to run a program in Python we can call subprocess.run, but also os.system and others).

The only reason nix-alien works so well for binaries is because they have a well designed mechanism to indicate their dependency (e.g.: ELF metadata), but even this can be bypassed by things like dlopen.

[thiagokokada]

The only reason nix-alien works so well for binaries is because they have a well designed mechanism to indicate their dependency (e.g.: ELF metadata), but even this can be bypassed by things like dlopen.

And this is the reason that nix-alien is missing libXext.so.6, java probably loads this library dynamically and there is nothing we can do except maybe doing a deep analysis of the binary itself (but this is error prone).