[tex-live] FInding locally installed packages in different environments

[Urs Liska]

Am 13.04.2018 um 12:30 schrieb Norbert Preining:
> Hi Urs,
>
>>   * look for or create and cd into ~/texmf/tex/latex
>>   * create a symlink with
>>     ln -s /path/to/our/project/latex-resources
>>   * try compiling the document
> Sounds fine. I would expect that the same thing works in all other
> variants of TeX Live, too. TEXMFHOME should NOT be prefixed with !!, so
> searching should work.
>
> You can ask your co-authors to run
>    kpsewhich --debug=32 <one-of-the-files-there>
> and see what is logged, it might give hints why the dirs are not
> searched. --debug=-1 which logs everything, but can be quite
> overwhelming.
>
>> I read about having to use texhash and/or mktexlsr - once or after every
>> changes to ~/texmf - but I don't seem to have to do that on my computer. Is
> If there is an ls-R file, please remove it!!! That is 100 times safer.
>
> Norbert

It turned out there was another issue at play (after the actual errors 
with wrong paths were sorted out).
As this was a new installation ~/texmf hadn't existed before, and the 
contributor basically created ~/texmf/tex/latex, which contained two 
symlinks to our LaTeX resources.
I ordered him to create a hidden dummy directory with a hidden dummy 
file in it - and voilà, the classes and packages were found.

I think I didn't explicitly state that we use LuaLaTeX, but I asked if 
the different engines behave differently in this respect.
And I recall from earlier questions that having at least ony actual 
directory available was necessary for LuaLaTeX to follow symlinks to 
find fonts. It seems this also goes for regular files.

To what extent is this known behaviour? And is this *acceptable* 
behaviour? Or did I even misunderstood anything and it now works by 
accident?

Thanks
Urs