You cannot expect bash behaviour then. It's bourne behavior not bash behavior. As you know, we go to great lengths to avoid bash dependencies in texi2dvi (and in all other core GNU shell scripts).
However, as I recall, there is a bug in some versions of bash that require case "$foo" instead of case $foo So that could be the culprit. The second hunk should definitely be a no-op. All shell code everywhere in GNU (autoconf, etc.) depends on foo=$bar being handled correctly (no word expansion of $bar). Or else something unrelated also changed. -k
