Include missing licenses in /build folder or omit the folder from distributed package

[jschirrmacher]

Discussed in #4179

^{Originally posted by riesel November 24, 2021}
We are including the socket.io-client package from https://www.npmjs.com/package/socket.io-client in our vue.js frontend.
There we are using webpack-license-plugin to scan for licenses in dependencies in our project.
This worked fine for socket.io-client versions < v4.4.0. From 4.4.0 on we see that the content of package.json in e.g. build\csj\ directory changed and now contains name and version information. Since it does not contain license information, webpack-license-plugin reports a missing license.

My question is whether the build directory has to be packaged at all or can be omitted to avoid this issue?

[jschirrmacher]

I've digged a bit deeper into the packaging process, and in my understanding the /build folder seems to be packaged accidentally. Actually, I've checked out the source, found no "build" target in package.json, but only a "compile" which is called during npm packaging. Doing that, a .tgz is created, but doesn't contain /build and in fact, our program using this cleanly setup package still works as expected. Is there anything I've missed, something that actually creates the /build folder?

So I hope that a simple re-packaging in a clean directory and a re-publish as e.g. 4.4.1 would work.
Do you have any plan to do so in the near future and can you already think of a date for such? I would very much appreciate that and would gladly help if needed in doing so.

[jschirrmacher]

Thanks for the update and the new version!
However, webpack-license-plugin still reports a missing license for 4.4.0, although we updated to 4.4.1.
Can you imagine where it finds such a version? I've checked package-lock.json, removed node_modules and re-installed anything, but to no avail. npm ls socket.io-client reports only version 4.4.1 now, no sign of 4.4.0 anywhere.

[darrachequesne]

@jschirrmacher that's weird, I'm not able to reproduce: https://github.com/socketio/socket.io-fiddle/tree/issues/socket.io/4194

[
  {
    "name": "socket.io-client",
    "version": "4.4.1",
    "repository": "https://github.com/socketio/socket.io-client",
    "source": "https://registry.npmjs.org/socket.io-client/-/socket.io-client-4.4.1.tgz",
    "license": "MIT",
    "licenseText": "The MIT License (MIT) [...]"
  },
  [...]
]

And I haven't found any reference to a cache at https://github.com/codepunkt/webpack-license-plugin.

[jschirrmacher]

Thanks for trying to reproduce!
I solved that problem now by using licenseOverrides in webpack-license-plugin for 4.4.0
This should help to prevent the error message and since we use 4.4.1, it should not really be a problem.

[darrachequesne]

@jschirrmacher great, thanks for the workaround! I get this can be closed now.