info may stress-test the terminal emulator

[Bruno Haible]

Hi,

This is a bug report about the 'info' program (GNU texinfo 6.8).

In a terminal emulator, I ran 'info m4', searched for m4_provide_if, then
attempted to abort this search by pressing some of the characters ESC, Enter,
Ctrl-Q, repeatedly. (I can't remember which character sequence exactly.)
At this point 'info' began to spew several BEL characters per second, which
the terminal emulator turned into popups on the screen. This caused the
terminal emulator to hang, losing the state of all the open tabs.

While it is certainly a bug in the terminal emulator when it hangs [1],
it is a fact that this terminal emulator was running flawlessly for over
two months and only the 'info' session brought it to its knees.
I have the suspicion that the 'info' program was feeding an endless
sequence of BEL characters to the terminal, thereby putting too much
stress on it.

Is there a way to fix/improve this erratic behaviour of the 'info' program,
please?

Bruno

[1] https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=465469