Apache-2.0 was the wrong declaration for two independent reasons.
Enabling the `vst3` feature links vst3-sys, which is GPLv3-or-later by its
own authors' choice — they describe their port as a derivative of
Steinberg's SDK that "was not made in isolation", so the obligation holds
regardless of any question about Steinberg's own rights. Gating the
feature kept the default build clean, but plugins built from this template
are intended to ship VST3, so GPL is where they land anyway. Declaring it
up front is more honest than deferring the decision to every clone.
Separately, parts of src/lib.rs derive from Robbert van der Helm's
NIH-plug cookiecutter template and its `gain` example, both ISC. ISC's one
condition is that its copyright and permission notice travel with all
copies, and this repo carried neither — a compliance gap that existed
regardless of the GPL question. ISC is GPL-compatible, so the notice is
retained in a new NOTICE file rather than superseded.
The `vst3` feature stays opt-in, but its rationale changes: it is no
longer about licence compliance, only about not pulling a sizeable
dependency into a CLAP-only build. The Cargo.toml comment said otherwise
and would have misled the next reader.
Also corrects the README's claim that you must "accept Steinberg's VST3
SDK licence". No SDK source is vendored or redistributed here, so there is
nothing to accept at build time. The real constraint is vst3-sys's GPLv3,
plus Steinberg's separate trademark in "VST" — a different regime from
copyright that no source licence resolves.
Copyright in the Irene <irene@novoyuuparosk.org> commits is held by the
repository owner (an agent identity), so no third-party agreement was
needed for this relicense.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WHt4DykxXaQnyaJfyS8KCn
The checker covered the identity strings a host sees, but not two other
kinds of template residue.
Descriptions: `Cargo.toml`'s `description` and `CLAP_DESCRIPTION` both
shipped as placeholders, and the latter surfaces in some host browsers.
Type names: `MyPlugin` and `PluginParams` appear at nine sites between
the struct definitions, the three trait impls, the two export macros and
the params field. Missing one is a compile error rather than silent drift,
so this is a convenience rather than a safety net - but naming the site
beats reading rustc, and the `Vst3Plugin` impl sits behind a cfg, so a
default build never reports it at all. Renaming the types is optional:
leave the canonical values alone and the checks stay green.
TODO markers are reported at a new informational level that never counts
toward pass/fail. They are legitimate while building, so failing on them
would just train you to ignore the run - but a finished plugin should not
quietly ship with five of them.
Two bugs surfaced while testing this:
- The stale scan drew its file list from `git ls-files`, which returns
nothing outside a checkout. In an exported tarball every stale spelling
was therefore reported absent - the section passed hardest exactly when
it could see least. It now falls back to `find` and says which source
it used.
- `grep -c` prints 0 and exits 1 when there are no matches, so the TODO
count's `|| echo 0` appended a second zero and produced an unparseable
value once a rename removed the last TODO.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WHt4DykxXaQnyaJfyS8KCn
Adapted from musiikki/codename-206, where the same script guards a single
plugin. It matters more here: renaming is the first thing anyone does with
a template, and identity is duplicated across Cargo.toml, bundler.toml,
src/lib.rs and the docs with nothing keeping them in agreement. A
half-finished rename builds a bundle under one name while the docs and
deploy script look for another.
Changes from the codename-206 original:
- Checks for files this repo does not ship (deploy.ps1) report as `skip`
rather than FAIL, and start enforcing once the file appears.
- STALE ships pre-seeded with this template's own placeholders, and each
entry is skipped while it is still part of a canonical value. That makes
renaming self-checking: entries arm themselves as you change the value
they belong to, with no bookkeeping. Substring rather than equality,
because placeholders nest — "your-domain" lives inside the canonical
CLAP_ID.
- Covers identity this template carries that codename-206's did not:
VENDOR, EMAIL, the Cargo homepage feeding Plugin::URL, that the `env!`
indirection is still in place, and the README's bundle command.
- Asserts CLAP_ID is reverse-DNS safe. A stray capital or space there is
not a compile error, it is a silent identity change between machines.
Two placeholder spellings had to move to avoid false positives, since a
checker that cries wolf trains you to ignore it: bundler.toml's comment
contained the literal "Plugin Name", and the CLAP_ID TODO spelled the
placeholder a third way that matched neither the constant nor the STALE
list. The TODO now illustrates the form instead of repeating a placeholder.
.gitattributes pins *.sh to LF so core.autocrlf=true on Windows cannot
check the script out with a CRLF shebang that dash rejects.
Verified three ways: clean template passes, a partial rename names every
drifted file, and a complete rename passes and still compiles.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WHt4DykxXaQnyaJfyS8KCn
Cargo.toml declared Apache-2.0 while the default build linked vst3-sys,
whose bindings are GPLv3 — so the artifact a fresh clone produced could
not legally be distributed under the licence the repo claimed. A template
should not hand that trap to every project cloned from it.
NIH-plug already anticipates this: its `vst3` feature exists, in upstream's
own words, "mostly for GPL-compliance reasons". Taking `default-features =
false` and re-exporting `vst3` as a local opt-in makes the default build
CLAP-only and genuinely Apache-2.0 clean, while `--features vst3` remains
one flag away for anyone who accepts GPLv3.
Gating the feature rather than relicensing keeps the decision with whoever
uses the template. Reversing it is a one-line default plus removing two
cfg attributes, where relicensing to GPLv3 now would commit every
downstream plugin to that choice.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WHt4DykxXaQnyaJfyS8KCn
Two things in the build instructions were wrong rather than merely thin.
The stated output paths (`nih_plug_template.vst3`) are not what the
bundler produces: `cargo xtask bundle` names artifacts from the `name` key
in bundler.toml, so a fresh clone actually yields `Plugin Name.vst3`.
Anyone following the deploy steps verbatim would copy a path that does not
exist. The VST3 artifact is also a directory bundle, so the `cp` needed
`-r` to work at all.
The egui editor pulls in baseview and x11, whose build scripts abort on a
missing `gl.pc` with a pkg-config error that says nothing about this
project. Naming the packages up front turns a confusing first-build
failure into a one-line fix.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WHt4DykxXaQnyaJfyS8KCn
mikkeli
irene