gristlabs/grist-core: technical due diligence, read from its repository

The median source file here is 132 lines. 22 files exceed 1,320 lines, the largest being 5,810. 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 (test/nbrowser/gristUtils.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.

Strings shaped like credentials appear only where fakes are usual: test fixtures, examples, documentation, placeholders and local stacks. They are almost always fakes. Ask someone to confirm that none of them works anywhere, because a real key in a development file is still a real key.

6 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.

6 places in product code build SQL by formatting or joining strings rather than passing parameters. 1 of them put a value into the string; in the rest, what the code shows going in is a table or column name, a constant, or something the line does not show. Ask whether any value reaches these strings, rather than a parameter.

6 places read data with a deserialiser that executes what it reads (Python `marshal`). That is safe on data the system wrote itself and remote code execution on anything else. Ask where each one's input comes from.

44 of 1,591 locked dependencies match 109 published advisories in OSV, 37 of them rated high or critical. A lockfile says which version is installed, not whether the flawed code is reachable from this product, so each needs a look. Most are fixed by an upgrade, and the advisory names the version. This lockfile pins development tools alongside what ships and does not say which is which, so some of these may never reach a user.

The newest was published on 2026-09-13. 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.

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.

3 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.