Read 2026-10-04
gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape: technical due diligence, read from its repository
What Borehole read in gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape's code and history at ba3d23a: 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 | adequate |
| Product & Engineering Maturity | adequate |
| Security & Reliability Posture | adequate |
| Observability & Operations | not assessable |
| Fit with the Acquirer | not assessable |
What the repository says
- Releases are cut from another branch than the one surveyed
COPYING: Relicensed: GPL-2.0 AND LGPL-2.1 → GPL-2.0 (2016-05-08).gitmodules:1: 8 submodule(s) this survey does not read: share/extensions, src/3rdparty/2geom, share/themes
Architecture & Codebase — including AI provenance
strongsrc/selection-chemistry.cpp is 4,469 lines, 39× this codebase's median file
adequateThe median source file here is 112 lines. 96 files exceed 1,120 lines, the largest being 4,469. 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.
src/selection-chemistry.cpp:1 — 4,469 lines (39× median) |
src/ui/dialog/inkscape-preferences.cpp:1 — 4,100 lines (36× median) |
src/livarot/ShapeSweep.cpp:1 — 3,622 lines (32× median) |
src/extension/internal/emf-inout.cpp:1 — 3,614 lines (32× median) |
src/style-internal.cpp:1 — 3,552 lines (31× median) |
Engineering Process & SDLC Maturity
adequateTests cover a thin slice of the codebase
adequate143 test files against 2,515 source files (5.7%). This does not measure whether the tests are good, only whether enough of them exist for the codebase to be changed safely by someone who did not write it — which is exactly the situation after an acquisition.
| 143 test files / 2,515 source files |
Product & Engineering Maturity
adequateEffort is shifting from building to rewriting
adequateDeleted lines per line added rose from 0.46 to 1.13 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 0.46, second half 1.13 (split 2016-05-21) |
7% of bug fixes add or change a test
adequateOf 407 fixes in the last 24 months, 27 touched a test. A fix without the test that would have caught the bug can quietly come back, and the suite never learns from what went wrong.
| 27 of 407 |
Releases are cut from another branch than the one surveyed
adequateThe newest release, INKSCAPE_1_4_4, is not on the branch this survey read; the newest release on it is INKSCAPE_0_48_0. The shipped product may differ from what this report describes. Survey the release branch too.
| tag INKSCAPE_1_4_4 |
Security & Reliability Posture
adequateNone of the standard security guard rails are configured
adequateThere is no disclosure policy, no automated dependency updates, no named code owners and no pre-commit configuration. None of these is load-bearing on its own. Their collective absence says that security posture here is whatever the current team happens to remember to do, which is not a posture that survives the team changing.
| checked 5 kinds of guard rail across 7,020 tracked files; 0 present |
1 vendored component with no licence
adequateThird-party code is committed into this repository without any statement of the terms it arrived under. Unknown terms are harder to deal with than inconvenient ones: an awkward licence can be complied with, an absent one cannot. Each of these needs its origin established before the code changes hands.
src/3rdparty/CMakeLists.txt — 1 tracked files, no licence file |
Observability & Operations
not assessableNot rated: only 4 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.
Read more, or read your own
The full report on gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape: every dimension, the questions for the room, and the audit log.
Survey a repository: free on public repositories. Private code is read on your own machine by a collector whose source you can read first.