netnews@wnuxb.UUCP (Ron Heiby) (11/28/84)
We are running netnews 2.10.2 with the "rn" patches (although they should not affect this). I have noticed that (it appears that) readnews updates .newsrc lines for all newsgroups to which an article was posted when it is read in one of them. This is a fine way to do it, except that it seems to update .newsrc lines for unsubscribed groups as well. I was just looking at my .newsrc and found several lines that were already ~100 characters long. I can see rationale for the current behavior. For example, I might have a couple of groups that I want to read seperately from my normal set. Even in that case, though, I might just as easily want those duplicates (like for archiving). My suggestion is that the netnews software ignore newsgroup lines that are of the form: sometext! anything which would include unsubscribed newsgroups and provide a mechanism for comments (is there one already?). This should not be extended to affect the special case of the "options" line at the top of the .newsrc. Now that we've dealt with the aesthetics, is there any software that will break when a .newsrc line reaches some N bytes in length? -- Ronald W. Heiby AT&T Something (used to be Comp Sys Div, but don't ask me now.), Inc. Lisle, IL (CU-D21) / ...!ihnp4!wnuxa!heiby or ...!ihnp4!wnuxb!netnews