Re: rationale of texmf-dist

> Hm, does this mean: texmf-dist can be on a network volume shared by many
> machines, but each can have its format files (e.g. with lots of
> hyphenation patterns on one system, with a minimal set on the other) in
> texmf? 

yes, that would work

> I still doubt whether we will adopt this in Debian, because of the
> filesystem hierarchy standard / LSB. $TEXMFMAIN traditionally resides in
> /usr/share/, but most of the directories or files in it will be symlinks
> to /etc/texmf/* (for configuration files) or /var/lib/texmf (for
> $TEXMFMAIN/web2c and others). 

In a canned environment like Debian, the texmf/texmf-dist
distinction does not really matter so much

Sebastian