jqlang/jq: technical due diligence, read from its repository

The median source file here is 34 lines. 6 files exceed 1,000 lines, the largest being 4,277. 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.

Of five ordinary markers — CI workflows, CODEOWNERS, a pull-request template, pre-commit hooks, contribution guidance — 1 is present: CI workflows. Branch protection itself is a GitHub setting rather than a file, so this is a reading of proxies and not of the rules themselves. What it does establish is that the process is not written down anywhere a new engineer would find it.

Deleted lines per line added rose from 0.38 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.

7 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.

The newest was published on 2026-06-16. A project that publishes advisories is telling its users about its fixes, and the count and pace say how much security work it carries. Whether 2 of them are fixed in the code you ship could not be told from this history: its version is only known to be at least 1.8.2. Answer lives in: the release you run, set against each fixed version. The record is incomplete: NVD: 3 records name jq with nothing tying them to this repository (CVE-2015-8863, CVE-2016-4074, CVE-2026-18038).