siteserver/cms: technical due diligence, read from its repository

88% of commit subjects are exact repeats of another subject, and subject length varies by only 4.9 characters. A log written by someone explaining their reasoning to a future reader does not look like this. The log is therefore weak evidence of intent, whatever the code is like.

The median source file here is 56 lines. 28 files exceed 1,000 lines, the largest being 30,828. 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.

254 places catch an error and do nothing with it, across 78 files (0.7 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.

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.

13 files were marked deprecated over two years ago and still are, the oldest since Nov 2020. A deprecation is a promise to remove. Ask what still depends on these, and whether removing them is scheduled.

Dependency versions are declared as ranges and no lockfile is committed, so a build today does not necessarily produce what a build last month produced. That matters twice over in a transaction: the thing being bought cannot be reproduced exactly, and a compromised upstream release arrives without anyone choosing to take it.

1 of 59 locked dependencies match 1 published advisories in OSV. 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.

Third-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.

The 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.

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.

5 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.