root/1.8.3/trunk/game/txt/README

Your local help/news/events/etc files can now be kept separate
from those distributed with PennMUSH, and can now be managed as
a set of files rather than a single large file.

Here's the details:

1. The source files for help.txt, news.txt, and events.txt are
   kept in directories called hlp, nws, and evt respectively.

2. Files in those directories which end in .<directoryname> are
   considered to be part of the text. That is, files in hlp/
   which end in .hlp, and files in nws/ which end in .nws
   will be merged into the final help.txt, news.txt, or whatever.

3. When the MUSH is restarted, a 'make' is run in this directory.
   For if a file in hlp/ is newer than help.txt, it calls
   compose.sh to rebuild help.txt. If you've got perl on your system,
   compose.sh will also call index-files.pl to make a 'help index'
   entry which lists all your help entries.

So, if you want to add your own news entries, make a file called
nws/local.nws and put 'em there. Or maybe organize it into parts:
nws/theme.nws, nws/code.nws, etc.

Files distributed with PennMUSH always begin with "penn", so don't
start your files with that.

You can also add files for "rules" and "index" commands if you
compiled them in. The easiest way to do add rules files is
to:
    a) create a directory here called "rules"
    b) put your rules files there, each ending in .rules
    c) edit game/txt/Makefile and add rules.txt to the TXT line
For index files, do exactly the same process, but replace all references
to 'rules' above with 'index'.