ether/etherpad: technical due diligence, read from its repository

The median source file here is 84 lines. 10 files exceed 1,000 lines, the largest being 10,714. Size is not a defect on its own — some problems genuinely live in one place — but these are where merge conflicts, review fatigue and single-owner knowledge concentrate, and they are the first thing that slows an inheriting engineer down.

The suite is configured to retry failing tests (src/tests/frontend-new/specs/line_ops.spec.ts). A retry turns a flaky test green without saying why it failed, so a green build means the tests passed eventually. Ask how many retries a typical run needs, and which tests need them.

Deleted lines per line added rose from 0.57 to 0.82 between the first and second halves of this history. Rework is normal and often healthy, but a rising ratio means an increasing share of the team's time is spent replacing code that already exists rather than building what does not. Whether that is deliberate repayment or churn is a question for the team.

The newest release, 3.3.9, is not on the branch this survey read; the newest release on it is 3.3.8. The shipped product may differ from what this report describes. Survey the release branch too.

15 third-party CI actions are referenced by a tag or branch rather than a commit, so they run whatever that tag points to on the day; 3 steps pipe a download straight into a shell. Tags have been moved to malicious commits in real supply-chain attacks, and a piped script is whatever the server returns that minute. Pinning to a commit is the fix, and it is small.

5 places run a command through a shell (`shell=True`, `os.system`, `exec` with a template) rather than passing arguments. Where any part comes from outside, it is command injection. Ask where each one's input comes from.

11 places set HTML from a value that is neither a literal nor passed through a sanitiser. Where the value can come from a user, that is stored cross-site scripting, and it is the first thing a buyer's security review looks for in a frontend.

The newest was published on 2026-10-18. A project that publishes advisories is telling its users about its fixes, and the count and pace say how much security work it carries. None of them affects the surveyed version. The record is incomplete: NVD: 3 records name etherpad with nothing tying them to this repository (CVE-2018-9325, CVE-2018-9326, CVE-2018-9327).

Nothing in the service initialises an error reporter (Sentry, Rollbar, Bugsnag, Honeybadger or an APM agent). An exception in production reaches a person only if someone is reading the logs, which usually means a customer reports it first.

1 images in the deployment configuration are named without a version or as `latest`. A redeploy can change the software without a commit, a rollback has nothing to roll back to, and nobody can say from the repository what is running.