Read 2026-10-04
koreader/koreader: technical due diligence, read from its repository
What Borehole read in koreader/koreader's code and history at b539d24: 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 | adequate |
| Security & Reliability Posture | strong |
| Observability & Operations | adequate |
| Fit with the Acquirer | not assessable |
What the repository says
COPYING: Relicensed: GPL-3.0 → AGPL-3.0 (2014-03-23).gitmodules:1: 5 submodule(s) this survey does not read: base, platform/android/luajit-launcher, test
Architecture & Codebase — including AI provenance
strongfrontend/ui/data/dictionaries.lua is 10,449 lines, 76× this codebase's median file
adequateThe median source file here is 136 lines. 37 files exceed 1,360 lines, the largest being 10,449. 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.
frontend/ui/data/dictionaries.lua:1 — 10,449 lines (76× median) |
frontend/ui/data/dictionaries_wikdict.lua:1 — 3,399 lines (24× median) |
plugins/statistics.koplugin/main.lua:1 — 3,241 lines (23× median) |
frontend/apps/reader/modules/readerhighlight.lua:1 — 3,040 lines (22× median) |
frontend/apps/reader/modules/readerfooter.lua:1 — 2,777 lines (20× median) |
Engineering Process & SDLC Maturity
strongNo finding.
Product & Engineering Maturity
adequate3% of bug fixes add or change a test
adequateOf 328 fixes in the last 24 months, 9 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.
| 9 of 328 |
Security & Reliability Posture
strongRelicensed: GPL-3.0 → AGPL-3.0 (2014-03-23)
adequateThe root licence changed 1 time(s). The latest terms restrict what users, hosts or a buyer may do in ways the earlier ones did not. Code taken under the old terms stays under them, so both matter in diligence.
Observability & Operations
adequateNo telemetry or error reporting is wired in anywhere
adequateNone of 791 readable files references an instrumentation, metrics or error-reporting library. If this system is in production, nobody learns that it broke from the system itself — they learn it from a customer. That is a reliability finding before it is an observability one.
| searched 791 tracked text files for 16 known instrumentation libraries; manifests for metrics, tracing and error-reporting families; locked dependencies for the packages that emit; 0 matched |
One request cannot be followed through the logs
adequateNothing in the service carries a request or correlation id, and there is no tracing. When a customer reports a failure, the log lines that belong to their request cannot be picked out from everyone else's.
| no request id, correlation id or tracing found |
No error reporter is wired in
adequateNothing 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.
| no error reporter initialised |
Fit with the Acquirer
not assessableNot rated: structurally not assessable from a repository.
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The full report on koreader/koreader: every dimension, the questions for the room, and the audit log.
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