How to adjust the $TEXMFCNF variable not to interfere with ConText?

[Ulrike Fischer]

Am Sat, 19 Sep 2020 15:16:39 -0600 schrieb Karl Berry:

> Hi Pablo - if you can give me a recipe for how to reproduce the
> problems,

well his main problem is that all locations where kpsewhich looks
for a texmf.cnf by default (as reported by kpsewhich -show-path=cnf)
are not writable for him. 

So he can't configure texlive unless he sets the environment
variable TEXMFCNF to point to a local texmf.cnf, but this breaks
context. 

I don't see what texlive could do here. Imho it sounds like
something that should be corrected in context. (When I had a similar
problem some years ago I set up a script to call context which did
reset TEXMFCNF, but perhaps a local context configuration file would
work too.)  

-- 
Ulrike Fischer 
https://www.troubleshooting-tex.de/