jmsellens@watmath.UUCP (John M Sellens) (06/26/85)
Once upon a time, I took a copy of readnews and added a couple of quick
hacks to make it possible to ask what a newsgroup is all about.
I had two commands, 'w' and 'W' ("what") for a short and long description
of the pupose of the group. The 'w' got the relevant line from whatever
file it is that contains the list of active newsgroups (you know, the one
that Gene Spafford gives us updates to once a month?) e.g.
net.wombat - Discussions about small furry things
The 'W' command went to the spool directory for the group and looked for
a file called "DESCRIPTION" (or some such thing) and printed it on the
screen (if it didn't exist, 'W' degenerated to 'w').
Of course to really implement this requires a new control message or two,
but it does avoid problems with expire, and article number bitmaps, etc.
John