Subject: Re: bug#16292: 24.3.50; info docs now contain single straight quotes instead of `'

From: Stefan Monnier <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 04 Jan 2014 00:18:15 -0500

>> I think we're pretty close to the point where ‘ and ’
>> can be assumed to work "everywhere", but we're not quite there yet.
>> But I'd hope that Debian builds would not follow that default and
>> would tell make info to use things like ‘ and ’ since these chars
>> should pretty much always work in a Debian system.
> OK, attached is a patch to implement that suggestion,

It doesn't quite follow the suggestion in the part about "so there's no
need to specify it explicitly in the file".  Isn't there a way other
than modifying the file to tell Texinfo that the encoding is utf-8?

> with the proviso that the default is to use curly quotes on
> Debian-like systems where UTF-8 support seems ubiquitous, and to use
> ASCII quotes elsewhere.

By "Debian builds" I really meant "builds of Emacs made by the Debian
team", not "builds made under Debian".

> This should simplify configuration on Debianish systems. The 'locale'
> command is used to check for UTF-8 support in English.

I'd rather not try to be clever here.  E.g. your test will end up using
ASCII in non-English locales, even though they're just as likely to
properly handle those Unicode chars.  Just default to no.

> This feels like a new feature, so I'm somewhat inclined to leave this
> stuff alone in the trunk until after the feature freeze is over.

Agreed.  One more thing: the config option might like to use a more
generic name like "--with-liberal-use-of-unicode".

        Stefan