How to adjust the $TEXMFCNF variable not to interfere with ConText?

[Karl Berry]

1) I haven't tried, but I don't know of any reason why TEXMFAUXTREES could
not be set in the environment. In general, variable lookups are treated
the same.

2)
    $ export TEXMFCNF='~/texmf:'

Evidently context does not support the trailing : syntax on TEXMFCNF, as
it is only looking in that home dir for texmfcnf.lua (which is in
texmf-dist/web2c, sibling to texmf.cnf):

  resolvers       | resolving | looking for regular 'texmfcnf.lua' on
  weird path '$HOME/texmf:' from specification '$HOME/texmf:'

So maybe some other variable could be set. But I also don't understand
why setting TEXMFAUXTREES should interfere with context in the first
place; all it does is add more trees to $TEXMF. -k