SVN: trunk kpse still in 2020

[Karl Berry]

Hi Johannes,

      PATH="/somewhere/trunk/Master/bin/x86_64-linux:$PATH"

Hey, me too :).

    I know that this is severe abuse of the SVN structure, 

Not abuse as far as I'm concerned.

    Accordingly, during format creation, fmtutil rightfully crazes out
    and reminds me that I'll have to use fmtutil-user instead of
    fmtutil-sys.

FWIW, personally I just let mktexfmt do the work
for this "run TeX out of svn" situation.

    Now my question: I was wondering why TeXLive *2021* still stores its
    formats, logs, etc. to ~/.texlive2020/ ? 

I don't know why it is happening for you. Maybe you have old
texmf.cnf values that are getting in the way? Or environment variables?
svn not updated?
kpsewhich -a texmf.cnf?
kpsewhich -var-value TEXMFVAR? 
etc.

    TL2021, when regularly installed via tlmgr, refers to ~/.texlive2021/
    as expected.

Indeed, the Master/texmf-dist/web2c/texmf.cnf that's in svn does have
.texlive2021. You can look in your svn checkout and see :).
Or: http://tug.org/svn/texlive/trunk/Master/texmf-dist/web2c/

--best, karl.