[tex-live] TEXINPUTS on windows

[Karl Berry]

    What I meant is that Lars would like to add an additional root to
    TEXMFLOCAL. 

This whole "root" thing is MikTeX terminology (which I have no real
understanding of, I just blindly include your text on my web pages,
Ulrike :).

In TeX Live (tetex, texk, web2c), TEXMFLOCAL is a directory.  One
directory.  You can't "add a root" to it.  Presumed to be arranged in a
TDS hierarchy.  Ditto TEXMFHOME -- it's one directory.

It would be possible to add and remove arbitrary directories to the TL
definition of TEXMF, which by default is:
TEXMF =
{$TEXMFCONFIG,$TEXMFVAR,$TEXMFHOME,!!$TEXMFSYSCONFIG,!!$TEXMFSYSVAR,!!$TEXMFMAIN,!!$TEXMFLOCAL,!!$TEXMFDIST}

I'm sure you'll understand that it is far from a simple thing to
arrange.

Even more complicated would be not requiring any particular subdirectory
structure in the directories.  That would mean changing every
definition in texmf.cnf.  Right now, for instance, we have:

TEXINPUTS.latex = .;$TEXMF/tex/{latex,generic,}//

Thus, adding anything to TEXMF is going to require latex input files to
be somewhere under a directory named "tex" in the "root" dir.  So, as
far as I can see, if we don't want to require the "tex/" subdir level,
this would mean definitions like:

TEXINPUTS.latex = .;$TEXMF/tex/{latex,generic,}//;$TEXMF_FLAT_DIR_ROOTS//

(I just made up the name off the top of my head, obviously.)
Something to ponder ...

karl