Re: cross references to manuals in different encoding fail

[Gavin Smith]

On Sat, Aug 20, 2022 at 02:24:29PM +0200, Patrice Dumas wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Cross reference with non ascii character fails when the other manual is
> not in the same encoding.  I attach an example with an ISO-8859-1 manual
> and an UTF-8 manual, both have the node
>  @node chap Cross-ref thé
> and an xref to the other manual, like
>  @xref{chap Cross-ref thé,,,cross_ref_utf8}.
> 
> The cross reference with a non ascii character in the node name does not
> work, in the latin1 manual, the error is:
>  Cannot find node 'chap Cross-ref th\351'
> In the UTF-8 manual, the error is:
>  Cannot find node 'chap Cross-ref thé'

In my opinion this is not worth spending any time on.  In practice node
names are nearly always all-ASCII.  Nobody's ever reported a problem
with inter-manual cross-references before, so I doubt it's a real problem.
It shouldn't be surprising that Info files in different encodings can't
refer to each other in this way.

It seems wrong to go to a lot of effort to allow this use case, when
it has never worked, and non-UTF-8 encodings should be on their way out
by now.