Stefan Monnier wrote:

>    I think we're pretty close to the point where ‘ and ’
>    can be assumed to work "everywhere", but we're not quite there yet.
>    But I'd hope that Debian builds would not follow that default and
>    would tell make info to use things like ‘ and ’ since these chars
>    should pretty much always work in a Debian system.

OK, attached is a patch to implement that suggestion, with the proviso
that the default is to use curly quotes on Debian-like systems where
UTF-8 support seems ubiquitous, and to use ASCII quotes elsewhere.
This should simplify configuration on Debianish systems. The 'locale'
command is used to check for UTF-8 support in English.

This feels like a new feature, so I'm somewhat inclined to leave this
stuff alone in the trunk until after the feature freeze is over.