rationale of texmf-dist

Hi Thomas, hi all,

I'm wondering what the reason for the creation of the additional
hierarchy texmf-dist is. If everything (nearly everything) from the
tetex distribution goes into this directory, what's the difference
between $TEXMFLOCAL and $TEXMFMAIN?

Thanks in advance, Frank
-- 
> Damn ... I thought I telepath'ed you not to let that out ... now I'll
Sorry, I'm not running stock Debian kernels, and I'm not running the
/dev/uri/geller patch.  My cutlery kept getting bent when I had it compiled,
so I got rid of it.                  [Matthew Palmer on debian-mentors]