[tex-live] asy & texmf v texmf-local

[John Bowman]

Hi Will,

> My proposed solution would be to change the configure script in Asymptote to first check for and use
>     `kpsewhich -var-value TEXMFMAIN`
> then try 
>     `kpsewhich -var-value TEXMFLOCAL`
> and then fall back to the old method of
>     `$prefix/share/texmf/tex/latex`
> but I can't imagine that one works very often :)

If you manually overwrite the version of asymptote.sty that ships with TL,
it seems to me that you should also manually overwrite the corresponding
asy binary file.

If instead you let configure install asy to /usr/local/bin
and you put /usr/local/bin in $PATH before /usr/local/texlive/2010/bin,
then you should also do the same with asymptote.sty, putting

/usr/local/texlive/2010/../texmf-local/tex/latex
before
/usr/local/texlive/2010/texmf/tex/latex

in $TEXINPUTS. This allows you to select between two different versions of
asy and its corresponding style file on the same system, as long as you keep
$PATH and $TEXINPUTS in sync.

Does this seem reasonable?

-- John