Re: ^M in the info files

[Stefan Monnier]

>>>> Does info.el need to use Emacs's auto-detection machinery?  I mean don't
>>>> Info files come with their own scheme to specify the encoding used?
>> 
>>> FYI.  Only gnus.texi and emacs-mime.texi have
>>> @documentencoding directive along with coding: tag.  As a
>>> result (or not, I'm not sure), the resulting info files
>>> "gnus" and "emacs-mime" contain coding: tag.
>> 
>> But the others are pure ASCII aren't they (isn't that what it means for
>> an Info file not to have a "coding:" tag)?

> If an Info file has no "coding:" tag, then the Info reader uses
> Emacs's auto-detection machinery.

I'm not talking about what Emacs does but about what the Info format
"specifies".  IIUC the Info format is always ASCII unless explicitly
specified by a conding: tag.  Of course, you can have an Info file
without a coding: tag that uses non-ASCII chars in some encoding, but
IIUC this has never been considered as valid (from TeXinfo's point
of view).

> But maybe in this case we should force some safe coding like `undecided'
> (as it seems to use now for pure ASCII Info files without null-bytes)?

No, I think it should use `us-ascii' instead.

>>> And, for instance, faq.texi has @today{} directive, and it
>>> seems that makeinfo generates a date string according to the
>>> current locale (and thus results in non-ASCII characters).
>> 
>> Isn't that a bug in makeinfo?

> IIUC, this is an intentional feature.  But we could run it with e.g.
> `LANG=C makeinfo' in Makefiles.

What happens if your TeXinfo file specifies a latin-1 encoding and your
date is output in utf-8 because of your locale, then?


        Stefan