csl-orig

Created: 14-06-2026 · Last updated: 11-07-2026

csl-orig is the canonical source-text store for the Cologne Digital Sanskrit Dictionaries (CDSL) — the single git-tracked home for the plain-text bodies of every dictionary the project publishes: PWG (Petersburger Wörterbuch, large), PW (small), MWS (Monier-Williams), PWK (Böhtlingk's shorter edition), GRA (Grassmann's Rig-Veda dictionary), AP90 (Apte 1890), FRI (Frisch's reader), and dozens more — currently 45 dictionary subfolders under v02/, from abch to snp and beyond.

Every downstream artifact — the generated XML, the web front-ends (csl-websanlexicon), the API layer (csl-apidev), the dashboards — traces back to a v02/<dict>/<dict>.txt file in this repo. Get a correction wrong here and it propagates to every reader-facing surface in the project; that is why this repo runs a stricter write discipline than almost any other in the org.

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Why this repo is read-only for direct pushes

Upstream maintainers Jim Funderburk and Dhaval Patel commit corrections directly to csl-orig — that is the canonical maintainer pattern. Agents and downstream contributors do not push directly. Instead, corrections are:

1. prepared and XML-validated locally against a snapshot of the target dictionary file,
2. queued together with an audit-trail change file in the sibling csl-corrections repo,
3. delivered as one consolidated pull request to csl-orig roughly once a month — never as a stream of small PRs or bot comments.

This exists because csl-orig sits at the root of the CDSL dependency graph: noisy, frequent, or unvalidated writes here would ripple into every dictionary's generated XML and every reader-facing site at once. The batching discipline is the load-bearing safety mechanism, not a formality. The full procedure is documented in the canonical csl-corrections correction-workflow.md.

Note: this read-only-for-direct-pushes rule governs dictionary text corrections. Ordinary repository-maintenance content (this README, CI config, and the like) is delivered by normal pull request.

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Correction workflow (summary)

The full 8-stage sequence — snapshot, apply via updateByLine.py or an equivalent controlled edit, regenerate + XML-validate, write the csl-corrections audit trail, then deliver by batched PR — lives in the canonical csl-corrections correction-workflow.md. This repo's own self-contained operator view — the 8 stages, the CFR preflight, the local safety hooks, the delivery split, and every gotcha — is docs/CORRECTION_MANUAL.md. In short:

• v02/<dict>/<dict>.txt files are canonical and may only change through the documented workflow (snapshot → change file → validate → audit trail → batched PR).
• Before applying any correction issue, check the sibling csl-corrections CFR and batch history for the same dictionary / L-number / headword — if it was already rejected or deferred, don't re-patch without a maintainer reopening the decision.
• Accepted corrections choose between a plain replacement or an inline correction layer ({{old->new||YYYYMMDD|author|issue|}}) that preserves the original reading.
• XML validation (csl-pywork/v02/generate_dict.sh + xmlchk_xampp.sh, or make_xml.py's "All records parsed by ET" on Windows without XAMPP) is required before any commit.

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Repository layout

v02/
  <dict>/
    <dict>.txt      canonical source text (the file every correction targets)
    ...             per-dictionary auxiliary files (varies by dict)

45 dictionary directories currently exist under v02/, including abch, ap90, ben, fri, gra, ieg, mw, pw, pwg, pwkvn, shs, and skd — this repo carries the full CDSL corpus, not only the handful of dictionaries the parent org actively maintains tooling for.

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Status

Issues are tracked against the Cologne issue taxonomy. As of 11-07-2026: 30 open, 2777 closed. The overwhelming bulk of closed work sits under the Digitization Quality milestone (2709 closed); Structured Data (43 closed) and Major Enhancements (14 closed) hold the rest, with a small tail of legacy date-labelled milestones. Recent commit activity is dominated by per-dictionary correction commits flowing through the documented workflow, plus front-matter and paper-related work on specific dictionaries.

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Tech stack

• Runtime: Python (correction tooling, updateByLine.py, diff generators)
• Validation: csl-pywork (generate_dict.sh, xmlchk_xampp.sh, make_xml.py for the Windows-without-XAMPP fallback)
• Pipeline docs: csl-observatory tooling runbook

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Dr. Mārcis Gasūns