Re: info may stress-test the terminal emulator

[Gavin Smith]

On Wed, Feb 08, 2023 at 01:46:57PM +0100, Bruno Haible wrote:
> 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.

There's no way for me to reproduce this.  I have an m4 Info manual installed
but the search for m4_provide_if terminates within a fraction of a second
so I cannot try aborting the search by pressing different keys.  Without
a way to reproduce the error then it's very hard to guess what the problem
might be.

However, I did find a bug in the current version that the Top node of
the m4 manual is not displayed properly.  (Tested with Texinfo 7.0.2.)
I suspect it may be related to a character encoding conversion from
iso-8859-1 to utf-8.  I'll investigate soon.  This would be very annoying
as the two previous bug fix releases both were to fix major bugs with
character encoding conversion in the info program.