[tex-live] textlive seems to ignore top of home tree

[Philip Taylor (Webmaster, Ret'd)]

Robin Fairbairns wrote:

> what is surely *not* a matter of opinion is
> that you are rattling on about a matter of no interest to anyone else,
> in the absence of an offer to code anything.

If your statement is true, Robin (and I sincerely hope
that it is not), then that is a sad reflection on the
TeX Live project.  What Virgil is trying to do is to make
life simpler for the first-time user of TeX Live : we both
know that learning TeX itself is non-trivial, so to expect
a first-time user of TeX Live to also familiarise himself
with the requirements of the TeX Directory Structure is
(IMHO) not very realistic.  Virgil is proposing that
such a user should be able to place a small number of
private files in the root of his/her TEXMFHOME directory,
and that TeX Live should be able to find them there.
It is not at all clear to me why the received opinion
is that this would cause a massive performance hit.
Virgil is not (as far as I can tell) suggesting that TeX
should search the entire TEXMFHOME tree before looking elsewhere --
rather that TeX should look first in TEXMFHOME itself
(presumably after looking in the current working directory)
and then continue to use its normal search mechanism.

** Phil.