Re: Bug in luatex handling of hidden dirs in TEXMFVAR

    only matters if you ever compile untrusted files).

I.e., pretty much any file not written from scratch by you.

    If you've explicitly set $TEXMFVAR to a value beginning with a dot,
    arguably, that should override the "no filenames beginning with a dot"

Arguably. But since the workarounds are so easy, I don't much want to
make yet another special case in the code for it and, as you say, risk
introducing bugs. --thanks, karl.