When creating info files for the GNU Emacs Lisp Reference Manual (app-doc/elisp-manual-24.3), I noticed that makeinfo 5.1 is very slow: With makeinfo (GNU texinfo) 4.13: $ time makeinfo elisp.texi real 0m1.677s user 0m1.498s sys 0m0.062s And with makeinfo (GNU texinfo) 5.1: $ time makeinfo elisp.texi real 1m10.085s user 1m9.594s sys 0m0.352s That's a factor of more than 40.
it's a feature! http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2013-03/msg00007.html The Perl texi2any/makeinfo both replaces and is intended to be (for all practical purposes) upward-compatible with the C makeinfo. It has many new features not in the C makeinfo. For example, cross-manual references are now fully supported, and allows for extensive customization of the HTML output. See the `Generic Translator texi2any' chapter in the manual (among other places) for more about this reimplementation. The new program is, unfortunately, noticeably slower at present than the C program was. We hope all the many improvements make the new version worthwhile for users nevertheless.
