After analyzing all 218 CodeQL alerts across the project's history, the
workflow has not justified its CI cost:
- The most impactful query (PotentiallyDangerousFunction) was a custom
systemd-specific query that has already been replaced by clang-tidy's
bugprone-unsafe-functions check (6fb5ec3dd1).
- Of the remaining C++ queries, 6 never triggered at all
(bad-strncpy-size, unsafe-strcat, unsafe-strncat,
suspicious-pointer-scaling, suspicious-pointer-scaling-void,
inconsistent-null-check).
- Several high-value-sounding queries had extreme false positive rates:
toctou-race-condition (95% FP), use-after-free (88% FP),
cleartext-transmission (100% FP).
- Many queries that did trigger are already covered by compiler warnings
(-Wshadow, -Wformat, -Wunused-variable, -Wreturn-type,
-Wtautological-compare) or existing clang-tidy checks
(bugprone-sizeof-expression).
- Across all alerts, only 3 genuinely useful C++ fixes can be
attributed to CodeQL: 1 tainted-format-string, 2
incorrectly-checked-scanf. The rest were either false positives or
incidental fixes during refactoring that weren't prompted by CodeQL.
- The Python queries are largely superseded by ruff (already in CI) and
had an 89% false positive rate on the security-focused checks.
The workflow consumed significant CI resources (40+ minutes per run) and
the ongoing maintenance burden of triaging false positives outweighs the
marginal value of the 2-3 real findings it produced across its entire
lifetime.
53d5f5c02f
