> From: Gavin Smith <gavinsmith0...@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.