The "dedup-legal-notices" plugin of jlink does de-duplication of legal notices from all modules in the image being generated. The de-duplication involves checking for file names and their contents under "legal" for each module and if the file name and content matches, the plugin maintains just one copy of the file in the generated image. All other modules which had this same legal notice file will instead now have a symbolic link to the one single copy. On platforms (like Windows) where symbolic links isn't available, the dedup-legal-notices plugin creates a replacement file whose content is textual instructions on where to find the original content of the legal notice file.

As noticed in https://bugs.openjdk.org/browse/JDK-8306980, there are certain places, like the javadoc tool which at a later point would want access to these legal notice files (in this case to copy them over). On Windows, such tools end up finding the replacement files which do not have the actual legal notice content and thus they have no seamless way to get access to the actual legal notice file.

This enhancement request is to introduce a new argument to the dedup-legal-notices plugin so that it can be instructed not to run any de-duplication (creation of symbolic links or replacement files) for specific modules, when the image is being created. This would then mean that the generated image will have the original legal notice files for such modules.