Real codebases that provide value to the end users are often old, big and ugly. That's one of the reasons people pour hours of their free time to github and such to produce something that is actually beautiful.
"relatively big spaghetti (tens of thousands of LOC)."
That's not very big.
"Should I just go and basically say that this person did a bad job? "
Definetly not. Just writing ugly code is not malfeasance. If the code actually works as expected once compiled then you have very little basis for this accusation.
Functionally complete and maintainable are two different things, and how much the second is cared about varies A LOT.
"The person in charge of this project was working on it alone and from the outside it all looks fine and it's working."
First, and the second metric of code in business is that a) does it compile b) does it work.
All other considerations are secondary.
"Maintainability" has no absolute metric. Organizations learn slowly about this, and see how it affects their internal capability to deliver, but there is no way you can directly point out based on what metric the code is faulty.
The guy before you did not do a bad job if it actually works.
The time to point fingers would be if there is no source code to be found, you found out it's some repurposed third party codebase with an incompatible license related to the business use of the code, you found out he had sneaked in a virus to the installer and so on.
'I've already made some comments about rewriting it and the response was basically "ok".'
Sounds like an ok way to move forward. Make sure you understand the business value of the codebase as well.
"relatively big spaghetti (tens of thousands of LOC)."
That's not very big.
"Should I just go and basically say that this person did a bad job? "
Definetly not. Just writing ugly code is not malfeasance. If the code actually works as expected once compiled then you have very little basis for this accusation.
Functionally complete and maintainable are two different things, and how much the second is cared about varies A LOT.
"The person in charge of this project was working on it alone and from the outside it all looks fine and it's working."
First, and the second metric of code in business is that a) does it compile b) does it work.
All other considerations are secondary.
"Maintainability" has no absolute metric. Organizations learn slowly about this, and see how it affects their internal capability to deliver, but there is no way you can directly point out based on what metric the code is faulty.
The guy before you did not do a bad job if it actually works.
The time to point fingers would be if there is no source code to be found, you found out it's some repurposed third party codebase with an incompatible license related to the business use of the code, you found out he had sneaked in a virus to the installer and so on.
'I've already made some comments about rewriting it and the response was basically "ok".'
Sounds like an ok way to move forward. Make sure you understand the business value of the codebase as well.