Re: rationale of texmf-dist

> Hm, does this mean: texmf-dist can be on a network volume shared by many
> machines,

Exactly. The files in texmf-dist will not be changed in any way by
any tool.

> 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). 

Please, keep things separate, I think this is a win for everybody. I
suggest the following scheme:
  TEXMFMAIN=/var/lib/texmf
  VARTEXMF=/var/lib/texmf
  TEXMFDIST=/usr/share/texmf
and /etc/texmf with config files (with symlinks in /var/lib/texmf).

By setting VARTEXMF, you make sure that no generated files end up in
$TEXMFDIST (e.g. fonts).

Thomas