it already partially It used English hyphenation patterns in all cases (and still does, if the real patterns aren't there).
I didn't notice any hyphenation difference after updating texinfo.tex, but I guess TeXlive 2008 is needed to see improvements More precisely, what you need (besides texinfo.tex and txi-LL.tex) is an "etex" (or "pdftex") .fmt that includes the patterns. And indeed, this is the case by default in TL08 and was not the case by default in TL07. Although in principle you could change things around in TL07, I suspect it would be far less work for everyone to simply install TL08 if you want the new hyphenation. (The native install won't interfere with your system installation.) karl