Initdb -E LATIN1 fails when no multibyte support compiled in (current CVS)

I've run into a problem with a fresh install from current CVS.
IIRC the same problem did not occur with the 7.1.2 release, so
this may be a bug introduced in the current CVS tree.

I've run configure _without_ --enable-multibyte. Then when I run
initdb with --encoding LATIN1 it fails with:

:initdb:
:/home/rene/scratch/PostgreSQL/installed/bin/pg_encoding:
:No such file or directory
:initdb: pg_encoding failed
:
:Perhaps you did not configure PostgreSQL for multibyte support
:or the program was not successfully installed.

Indeed when I configure with --enable-multibyte and rebuild,
initdb --encoding LATIN1 works fine.

But now the problem: LATIN1 is of course a singlebyte encoding.
So why is multibyte support needed to use it?

If this is the intended behaviour, I think the documentation of
--enable-multibyte in the INSTALL file (and perhaps in other
places) should be fixed. And if at all possible, it should be
renamed too.

Regards,
René Pijlman