Read 2026-11-03
getpelican/pelican: technical due diligence, read from its repository
What Borehole read in getpelican/pelican's code and history at c2fff53: its licence, security advisories, releases, review practice, tests, dependencies and operations. Every finding cites the file and line it rests on. The full report also covers the team and asks the questions the code cannot answer.
| Dimension | Rating |
|---|---|
| Architecture & Codebase — including AI provenance | strong |
| Engineering Process & SDLC Maturity | strong |
| Product & Engineering Maturity | strong |
| Security & Reliability Posture | strong |
| Observability & Operations | not assessable |
| Fit with the Acquirer | not assessable |
Architecture & Codebase — including AI provenance
strongNo finding.
Engineering Process & SDLC Maturity
strongNo finding.
Product & Engineering Maturity
strongEffort is shifting from building to rewriting
adequateDeleted lines per line added rose from 0.62 to 0.80 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.
| first half 0.62, second half 0.80 (split 2018-09-13) |
Security & Reliability Posture
strongThe build runs third-party code it does not pin
adequate4 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. 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.
.github/workflows/main.yml:32 — action pinned by tag |
.github/workflows/main.yml:51 — action pinned by tag |
1 deserialiser that can run code
adequate1 places read data with a deserialiser that executes what it reads (pickle). That is safe on data the system wrote itself and remote code execution on anything else. Ask where each one's input comes from.
pelican/cache.py:36 — code-executing deserialiser |
Observability & Operations
not assessableNot rated: only 5 of 16 checks could reach a conclusion here; the rest do not apply to this repository or could not read it.
Fit with the Acquirer
not assessableNot rated: structurally not assessable from a repository.
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The full report on getpelican/pelican: every dimension, the questions for the room, and the audit log.
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