it was consistent with some changes in the GNU coding standards. The coding standards themselves don't require a particular style of quoting, but almost all GNU packages are using '...' now and a number of people asked for this, as I recall.
Failing to include the change in NEWS was a mistake. I'll add it. Having a way to easily restore the `...' output in Info is ok with me. If it's easy enough, we could do that for 5.1. Up to Patrice. k
