For many years (dating back to when I maintained Texinfo), the way Texinfo gets to CTAN is that I download the distribution tarball(s), unpack it in ftp://tug.org/tex/texinfo*, and CTAN mirrors from there. The CTAN metadata does not get updated in that process. It would not be simple to do that. At best we could remove all the version-specific stuff in the metadata, as we've done with other mirrored packages.
The slightly-stale texinfo.zip file was probably autocreated on the CTAN end at one point. In any case ... overall, I don't see a good reason to keep the Texinfo sources/distribution on CTAN nowadays, and I'd be happy to stop doing the manual mirroring. Thus my suggestion is 1) delete CTAN:macros/texinfo/texinfo and texinfo.zip; 2) I will delete the texinfo directories on tug.org; 3) CTAN and I can work out some description so that https://ctan.org/pkg/texinfo explains the situation. Also, not related to the original report, but while we're here, I suggest moving CTAN:macros/texinfo/contrib, or rather its single subdir texinfo-hu, to obsolete (and deleting contrib/). It contains a version of texinfo.tex from 2007, adapted to (if I remember right) Hungarian. I can't imagine that it is still of any use today. That will just leave macros/texinfo/latest, which contains only those files which are updated on their own on ftp.gnu.org. That can remain unchanged. What does everyone think? --thanks, karl.
