Re: How to avoid a "basic" single quote being replaced by a "curvy" one?

[Karl Berry]

Hi Tim,

It's quite usual for packages to include a copy of texinfo.tex,
precisely to reduce cross-dependencies.  But I understand not wanting to.

Anyway, the version of texinfo.tex that comes with texinfo-5.2 would
work fine too (those commands have been there for a few years).  That's
not the problem.  The problem is that any new texinfo.tex, whether it's
the one from ftp[mirror].gnu.org or the texinfo-5.2 release or wherever,
has to be installed in a place where TeX will see it.  Clearly
TEXMF=$HOME/texmf is not such a place at your site; that was just an
example.

In general, there is no practical way for the Texinfo package to know
how the local TeX installation works.  Usually it would not have
privileges to overwrite the existing texinfo.tex anyway, or it would be
undesirable to do so, or who knows what.  The sysadmins have to do the
right thing.  Maybe you could send them a newer texinfo.tex and they'd
be willing to install it?

There are various ways that you could set things up so that you
personally could find texinfo.tex.  One would be to set the TEXINPUTS
environment variable to, I think,
  $HOME/texmf/tex/texinfo:
Notice and include the trailing colon -- everything will fail without that.
This won't help the users of your package, of course, if you're worried
about that.

(That is, I'm guessing you still have a ~/texmf/tex/texinfo/texinfo.tex
as a result of your make install-tex.)

Best,
Karl

P.S. I'll be offline this weekend, so further complications here will
have to wait until next week to be resolved :).