Jacques Perriere also passed away. I have a lot of comments in the various comment fields and many thoughts (including that it is not a place to share new work, and vernacular work, not without better sorting) but it’s a lot of work. Also, I agree on titles, and no periods should ever be introduced into file titles either. But the titles are inconsistent and file names atrocious.

It’s not about intervening. It’s about getting Olivier to respond.

It’s all reversible. We need a style guide. Some suggestions are also on the Gregorio mailing list. I don’t have time to do it this week but it is something which I will return to in due course.

I agree.

Interestingly, the homepage works, and if you search directly for the first incipit letter it works. It's the "scores" page that's not working. But you can still get to things via:

https://gregobase.selapa.net/incipit.php?letter=A (change the letter to whatever you need)

Works fine for me, except that the "logout" control isn't working properly. But all of this still makes me even more worried: just because the site is usable for now doesn't mean it will stay usable. (And while the codebase may be hosted on a git repository, AFAIK the database of chants only exists on M. Berten's server.)

Also I remember @xmarteo mentioning somewhere that he has (or had at the time) direct access to the live database, so the bus factor regarding GregoBase data preservation may be at least 2.

Yesterday's outage might or might not be related to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP2Shell

I think Olivier did update PHP because the PhpMyAdmin login page has been updated (though not PhpMyAdmin itself).

If he did not update PHP however, it is only a matter of time before someone brings Gregobase down for good.

As implied above, I do have access to Gregobase's PhpMyAdmin, so I can dump the DB and make manual edits into the DB, including running SQL commands. Not having access to the server itself I cannot easily cron a DB dump, which would be, if not ideal, at least a first-step contingency measure.

Here is an emergency dump: https://ftp.marteo.fr/grego.sql

I fully agree with @igneus that "it would be beneficial to the project if its development and governance was transferred to a larger body with a sufficient level of redundancy, clear community standards and processes to create, update and enforce them" and I guess Olivier would be fine with it - but which body? CMAA, Una Voce?

Running Gregobase doesn't cost much but the ~300€/yr has to come from somewhere, and more importantly, Gregobase has become very technologically outdated (using manual string comparison to store diffs in-DB as a means of version control has not been done since the 90s!) and needs further development efforts.

Edit: regarding the developmental "death" of Gregobase: just because nothing is committed to Github does not mean nothing is done, because Olivier patches prod directly and does not always commit his changes :p

I just ran a couple audit queries that I wrote back in 2021 to measure the quality of the data in Gregobase and it is not great. Hundreds of misattributed sources, misattributed versions, junk scores (almost empty GABC or random "tests" by people). I'll do some emergency cleanup today as I have a couple hours on my hands.

https://grego-analytics.marteo.fr/ gives some insight (not updated live, so if you check this link after I did my cleanup you will have a very outdated picture).

Also reminder that emptying Gregobase entries is /not/ the way to remove duplicates. There is an auto-redirect feature ("duplicateof" field in the chants table).

CMAA has the drawback of not being an international association; whereas Gregobase was created by a Belgian to demonstrate the capabilities of a system built by a French and maintained by a Brasilian, an American an a Czech, and most of its contributions came from an Australian.

Given the importance of Gregobase in the ecosystem, it could be an ad-hoc body as well, if we can somehow find funding.

Thank you @xmarteo I was hoping to avoid a htttrack dump ;)

They are a for-profit company, instinctively I am wary of the idea.

So, the good news is, Olivier is alive, and the outage was, in fact, due to him updating PHP following the the PHP2Shell vulnerabilities, so Gregobase isn't going anywhere just yet.

What I suggest for the present is that, short-term, someone should step up as lead maintainer, receive admin rights on the Github repository, fix the legitimate bugs that pile up in the Github issues, and arbitrate on the pending pull requests. The right candidate is obviously @igneus but does he want to?

In parallel, I would advocate the setting up of a test instance with a modern stack (latest Debian, PHP, Wordpress and Gregorio) to a) test added features outside of prod (currently the only instance afaik) and b) fix the issues that might arise due to such a jump in time. I can set that up if needed on a marteo.fr subdomain.

Finally, longer term, Gregobase could move out of selapa.net to its own server thanks to the generous funding of donor(s) that have already and will in the future manifest themselves. This would allow low-level maintainance of the prod instance to stop relying on a single person. It is also at that point that, since the running of the site would no longer be only under Olivier's responsibility, some sort of board should be put in place to define and enforce community guidelines.