[Soot-list] Possible issue with dex files

[Gianluca Mezzetti]

Dear sooters,
i'm new to this community, and, first of all, i would like to say thanks to you for developing this cool tool.
However i have some problems that I would like to discuss with you.

I have a setting where i need to instrument single dex files, because of this I modified  src/soot/SourceLocator.java 


switch( Options.v().src_prec() ) {
             case Options.src_prec_class:
                 classProviders.add(classFileClassProvider);
+                classProviders.add(new DexClassProvider());
                 classProviders.add(new JimpleClassProvider());
                 classProviders.add(new JavaClassProvider());
                 break;

With this setting i'm able to read and write dex files without the need of an android.jar, relaying on the phantom-ref feature.
However, when I try to install the dex i have problems with dexopt, that seems to be originated exactly from the missing jar.
It is the android.jar really needed to compile to dex files ?

The detail of the dexopt error are the following:
Invalid name : 'Ljava/lang/annotation/ElementType;'

raised in DexSwapVerify.cpp 
  s = dexStringById(state->pDexFile, item->nameIdx);
    if (!dexIsValidMemberName(s)) {
        ALOGE("Invalid name: '%s'", s);
        return NULL;
    }

to me it seems really not a valid member name, example of member names are the following:

E/dalvikvm( 2067): Valid name example: 'plugin'
E/dalvikvm( 2067): Valid name example: 'toLink'
E/dalvikvm( 2067): Valid name example: 'this$1'
E/dalvikvm( 2067): Valid name example: 'val$classLoader'
E/dalvikvm( 2067): Valid name example: 'this$0'
E/dalvikvm( 2067): Valid name example: 'caches'
E/dalvikvm( 2067): Valid name example: 'map'

where is that spurious name coming from ? 
It is an annotation....is it that relevant ?
If you give me some hints about where I could take a look, i could investigate the issue deeper.

Thanks a lot.

Gianluca Mezzetti
Post-doc at Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark