Does anyone have an idea why this might happen? Not out of my head. And Sergey's main server (gnu.org.ua) apparently developed hardware woes, so I doubt he'll be able to answer anything Texinfo-related quickly.
(I tried compiling current sources, but that didn't work out, Sergey has made a ton of changes since info 4.13. Really need to work from the development sources. I can try compiling with your options at some point. (BTW, it is explicitly not a goal for Texinfo, or GNU packages in general, to compile with -Wall, although some individual maintainers choose to do so. I doubt that's relevant to the problem at hand, anyway.) karl