saltstack/salt: technical due diligence, read from its repository

The median source file here is 135 lines. 87 files exceed 1,350 lines, the largest being 10,624. 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.

594 places catch an error and do nothing with it, across 221 files (0.5 per thousand lines). Each is a failure the system will not report. They surface later as problems nobody can explain, and they are cheap to fix now.

13 tests are individually marked to retry. 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.

3 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; 9 steps pipe a download straight into a shell. 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.

1 places in product code build SQL by formatting or joining strings rather than passing parameters. In each, what the code shows going in is a table or column name, a constant, or something the line does not show, not a request's value. Ask whether any value reaches these strings, rather than a parameter.

12 places read data with a deserialiser that executes what it reads (`yaml.load` without a safe loader). That is safe on data the system wrote itself and remote code execution on anything else. Ask where each one's input comes from.

The newest was published on 2026-01-30. 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. The record is incomplete: NVD: 70 records name salt with nothing tying them to this repository (CVE-2020-8028, CVE-2021-21996, CVE-2021-22004, …).

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.