Brittleness with texinfo and version numbering

[octave]

The current octave development version number is 3.3.50+.  The '+'
character is rather special in UNIX naming and in this case it is
breaking the macro @verbatiminclude which is used, for example, in oop.texi.

The actual problem is the value of abs_top_srcdir.  For Mercurial
archives this is whatever the user named the directory when cloning the
repository.  In my case I just used the name 'octave-dev' and my
Mercurial code compiles fine.  However, if one does 'make dist' the
resulting file includes the version (octave-3.3.50+.tar.gz) and this
code will extract to the directory octave-3.3.50+ and will not compile
the documentation.

Offhand I can think of two simple solutions.
1) Stop using '+' or other special characters in version numbering
2) Switch from absolute srcdir naming to relative path naming (../../
avoids any reference to octave-3.3.50+)

Which solution does the community prefer?

--Rik