[tex-k] mktexlsr does not include $TEXMFLOCAL when refreshing

[R (Chandra) Chandrasekhar]

Dear Folks,

I have installed TeXLive 2008 on a Debian-based Kubuntu Intrepid AMD-64 
PC from DVD.

I realize that the experimental biblatex package will not be part of 
TeXLive until it is actually released. Nevertheless, since I use it, I 
decided to install it.

I have installed it as directed by the package author and my root texmf 
directory is

/usr/local/texlive/2008/../texmf-local

which is really

/usr/local/texlive/texmf-local

This was also the directory returned by

kpsewhich -expand-var '$TEXMFLOCAL'

I did

sudo mktexlsr

after the installation.

After that,

kpsewhich biblatex.sty

gave a null response.

Only after

sudo mktexlsr /usr/local/texlive/texmf-local

was the location of biblatex.sty returned by kpsewhich.

This is contrary to past behaviour because the default paths, like 
$TEXMFLOCAL, if they exist, have always been searched and indexed by 
mktexlsr.

Is this the standard behaviour from now on, or is it some environment 
variable that is missing from my .bashrc file that is causing the 
problem? Or is it something I inadvertently did while installing biblatex?

Thank you.

Chandra
P.S. If I have misposted, please direct me to the correct mailing list. 
Thanks.