[Ian Clanton-Thuon (iclanton)]

Summary

A JavaScript chunk's license-reference banner can be larger than the complete license text it points to. Add an opt-in inlineShortLicenses option to ModuleMinifierPlugin so short notices can stay in the JavaScript without emitting a companion .LICENSE.txt asset.

new ModuleMinifierPlugin({
  minifier,
  inlineShortLicenses: true
});

Details

• Default the option to false, retaining the existing external-license policy.
• Compare the complete, deduplicated license text with the actual reference banner in UTF-8 bytes, including comment delimiters and newlines. Equal-size and longer notices remain external.
• Make the decision before calling emitAsset, rather than emitting a license asset and removing it in a later processing pass.
• Feed the chosen banner or inline notice through existing asset rehydration so source maps and module-position metadata account for its length.
• Preserve license banners for chunks containing only inlined modules. The previous no-placeholder path returned the asset source unchanged and dropped the banner, including external-license references.
• Include the new option in the existing configuration hash and increment the code-generation revision for the corrected banner behavior.
• Update the package README, generated API report, and minor change file. This change is limited to the webpack 5 plugin.

How it was tested

• node common/scripts/install-run-rush.js build --to @rushstack/webpack5-module-minifier-plugin
• node common/scripts/install-run-rush.js test --to @rushstack/webpack5-module-minifier-plugin
• All 23 plugin tests pass, including 16 new real-webpack cases covering omitted/disabled defaults, UTF-8 size boundaries, Unicode, deduplication, multiple notices, line/block comments, empty notices, nested content-hashed filenames, entry/async chunks, source maps, and module-position metadata.
• Temporarily changing the strict comparison to allow equal-byte notices to inline caused the boundary regression test to fail; the original implementation was restored and the suite passed.