Re: Texinfo macros and m4

[Karl Berry]

    Well, up to now it is possible (in almost all cases) to process
    texinfo documents with TeXLive out of the box to get a PDF, 

Well, not exactly (see below), but in any case, as far as I can see
nothing in this regard changes by introducing an optional call to m4.
First, virtually no Texinfo manuals will need m4 -- few manuals use
@macro, and few of those few would benefit from changing.  Second,
anyone who wants to process a document that now needs m4 will be
virtually certain to be on a system that already has m4, or at worst be
able to trivially acquire it.

    since makeindex is part of TeXLive.  

It is, but that is irrelevant to Texinfo.  Texinfo needs texindex, and
that is not part of TL.  I removed it (and all of the rest of texinfo
save texinfo.tex) a couple years ago because the version skew and distro
conflicts were uselessly painful.

karl