[platform-testers] Texinfo 7.1.90 pretest available

[Gavin Smith]

A pretest distribution for the next Texinfo release (7.2) has been
uploaded to

https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/texinfo/texinfo-7.1.90.tar.xz

A large amount of new C code has been added to the texi2any program,
which may have portability issues across platforms and versions of Perl.
Hence, testing is much appreciated.  More processing takes place in
native code (if XS modules are in use), and this leads texi2any to be
somewhat faster.

For HTML output, a very substantial speed-up is effected with the XS
converter module, which is enabled by setting TEXINFO_XS_CONVERT=1 in
the environment.  For now, this module is not used by default.

texi2any will issue more warnings by default about unusually structued
menus, and for unknown web URLs for cross-references in HTML output.
The output from "texi2any --epub3" has much greater conformance to
EPUB standards.  There are new options to customize the sorting of
document indices.

For Info output, texi2any outputs a document language in the "Local Variables"
section of output files to allow Info readers to handle non-English
manuals better.  There is greater compatibility with the XDG Base
Directory Specification in both texi2any and info.

The texinfo.tex file (for processing with TeX) now only functions properly
with texi2dvi 6.7 or newer (from 2019), due to a change in the format of
the auxiliary files it outputs.

We make these pretests to help find any problems before we make an official
release to a larger audience, so that the release will be as good as it
can be.

Please send any feedback to <bug-texinfo@gnu.org>.

Here is the full news:

* Build
  . "make install" installs files for texi2any under $datadir/texi2any, not
    $datadir/texinfo.

* texinfo.tex
  . use @ as the escape character in all index files.  this requires
    new enough texi2dvi (Texinfo 6.7, 2019) for index files to be
    properly processed.
  . a bug has been fixed where a mangled PDF outline could be produced for
    a document using @unnumberedsec
  . you can call @unmacro with an undefined macro name, matching the
    behavior of texi2any

* texi2any
  . set CHECK_NORMAL_MENU_STRUCTURE by default.  this means texi2any
    again checks menu structure by default (changed in 6.8 release, 2021).
  . only allow @definfoenclose to be used to redefine highlighting commands
  . sorting of indices is now independent of the input or output encodings
  . new customization variable COLLATION_LANGUAGE to allow linguistic
    tailoring of index sorting
  . new variable DOCUMENTLANGUAGE_COLLATION to use @documentlanguage for
    linguistic tailoring of index sorting
  . new variable USE_UNICODE_COLLATION to allow turning off the slower
    use of Unicode collation when sorting indices
  . rename BODYTEXT customization variable to BODY_ELEMENT_ATTRIBUTES
  . rename COMPLEX_FORMAT_IN_TABLE customization variable to
    INDENTED_BLOCK_COMMANDS_IN_TABLE
  . remove the following variables: AVOID_MENU_REDUNDANCY, FRAMES,
    FRAMESET_DOCTYPE, NO_USE_SETFILENAME, SILENT, USE_UP_NODE_FOR_ELEMENT_UP
  . remove SIMPLE_MENU variable and tree transformation
  . the use of the directories ~/.texinfo and ~/.texi2any for configuration
    files is deprecated, and should be replaced by texinfo or texi2any
    directories under XDG_CONFIG_HOME (usually ~/.config/).  the new
    locations are compatible with the XDG Base Directory Specification.
    in future versions, the ~/.texinfo and ~/.texi2any directories will
    not be in search paths.
  . do not try the us-ascii encoding anymore as a locale for translated
    document strings.
  . some unused translation files have been removed for the
    `texinfo_document' domain
  . Info output:
      . output Info-documentlanguage in Local Variables section of output
        file if @documentlanguage is given
  . HTML, Texinfo and raw text output:
      . an implementation of the conversion in C has been included, which
        is much faster than the code in Perl. set the `TEXINFO_XS_CONVERT'
        environment variable to 1 to use.
  . HTML output:
      . CHECK_HTMLXREF set by default for warnings about links to unknown
        external manuals
      . you can use the MATHJAX_CONFIGURATION customization variable to add
        data to the MathJax configuration object
      . warn if there is a .inf or .info suffix for cross-reference manual
      . use <pre> instead of <div><em> for output of @displaymath
      . remove border, cellpadding, cellspacing and align attributes.  add
        classes and use CSS when needed.
  . EPUB output:
      . stricter conformance for conformance checkers

* info
  . check for init file under XDG_CONFIG_HOME/texinfo/infokey after
    checking ~/.infokey, in accordance with the XDG Base Directory
    Specification

* Distribution
  . automake 1.17, autoconf 2.72, gettext 0.22.5