[MNG-8768] Add a function for conditional profile activation evaluating to true if a certain executable can be found in the system path

[jira-importer]

Juan Farré opened MNG-8768 and commented

I have a use case that I think is of general interest.

I am generating a native image with GraalVM native-maven-plugin, and I'd like to autodetect the presence of the musl gcc compiler wrapper x86_64-linux-musl-gcc in the path to generate a static executable.

When using GraalVM to build an image with the following options,

native-image --static --libc=musl ...

it tries to use x86_64-linux-musl-gcc to compile. If it isn't available in the system path, it crashes.

My idea is to activate a profile when building under Linux x86_64 and the executable x86_64-linux-musl-gcc is detected in the path. This profile would add the options --static and --libc=musl to the native-maven-plugin configuration.

It could be a function like:

executable(executable_name_or_path)

It would search for the executable in the system path (unless a path is given) and check that it's actually an executable.

I think this can be useful for many other use cases.

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This issue is a sub-task of MNG-8292

[Hiteshsai007]

I've implemented this in #12332.

The solution adds an executable(name_or_path) function to Maven 4's
condition-based profile activation DSL (alongside the existing exists(),
missing(), inrange(), etc.).

How it works:

• If a plain name is given (e.g. executable('musl-gcc')), each directory
  in the system PATH is searched in order
• On Windows, extensions .exe, .cmd, .bat, .com are tried automatically
  when the name has none
• If an absolute/relative path is given (e.g. executable('/usr/bin/musl-gcc')),
  it is checked directly without PATH traversal
• The PATH is read from ProfileActivationContext system properties
  (env.PATH) — consistent with how Maven exposes all env vars

The use case from the issue now works as:

<activation>
  <condition>executable('x86_64-linux-musl-gcc')</condition>
</activation>