Loss of search facility in info in newer releases of Texinfo

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hello, Texinfo.

In info produced by older releases of Texinfo it was possible, in Emacs,
to search for the result of @code{foo} with the six key presses

    C-s ` f o o '

..

This no longer works for me in current Texinfo because what used to be
ASCII punctuation characters in info, ` and ', have been replaced by
Unicode curly quotes, which don't exist on my keyboard.  Thus I cannot
search for `foo' in any reasonable way in Emacs.

Also, the display of these Unicode punctuation characters is awkward and
ugly on my Linux console.

The Emacs maintainer, Eli Zaretskii, has expressed his opposition to
implementing a workaround inside Emacs.

So, would it be possible to implement a new option in makeinfo/texi2info
which, whilst outputting UTF-8, would use the ASCII punctuation
characters, as older Texinfo versions used to do?

Thanks!

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).