Re: Texinfo 7.1 released

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Gavin Smith <gavinsmith0123@gmail.com>
> Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2023 15:07:26 +0100
> Cc: bug-texinfo@gnu.org
> 
> We have released version 7.1 of Texinfo, the GNU documentation format.

I'm sorry to say that makeinfo in this new release of Texinfo has
serious problems, when built with MinGW on MS-Windows.  Here are the 2
problems I immediately saw in real-life usage of this version, as soon
as I installed it:

  . makeinfo is painfully slow.  For example, building the ELisp
    manual that is part of Emacs takes a whopping 82.3 sec.  By
    contrast, Texinfo-7.0.3 takes just 20.7 sec.  And this is with
    Perl extensions being used!  What could explain such a performance
    regression? perhaps the use of libunistring or some other code
    that handles non-ASCII characters?

  . makeinfo seems to ignore @documentencoding, at least in some
    places.  Specifically, it consistently produces ASCII equivalents
    of some punctuation characters, like quotes “..” and ’, en-dash –,
    etc.  Curiously, other punctuation characters, and even the above
    ones in some contexts, _are_ produced.  As an example, makeinfo
    7.1 produces

         If you don't customize ‘auth-sources’, you'll have to live with the
      defaults: the unencrypted netrc file ‘~/.authinfo’ will be used for any
      host and any port.

    where 7.0.3 produced

         If you don’t customize ‘auth-sources’, you’ll have to live with the
      defaults: the unencrypted netrc file ‘~/.authinfo’ will be used for any
      host and any port.

    Note how ’ in "don’t" and "you’ll" produced the ASCII ', whereas
    ‘auth-sources’ and ‘~/.authinfo’ are quoted with non-ASCII quote
    characters.  Why this difference?  Texinfo 7.0.3 produces
    non-ASCII quotes in both cases.

The above basically means I'm unable to upgrade to 7.1, and will need
to keep using v7.0.3 for the time being.

I'm sorry I didn't try this version on the Emacs docs when it was in
pretest.  To my defense, I never before saw such issues once the test
suite runs successfully.  Any suggestions for debugging the above two
issues will be welcome.