LUAINPUTS

[Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard <mpg@elzevir.fr>]

Dear Debian TeX maintainers,

I recently noticed that the value of LUAINPUTS in a Debian TeX Live (2009-15,
luatex 0.70.1-1+b1) installation is

LUAINPUTS    = .;$TEXMF/scripts/{$progname,$engine,}/lua//

which is the quite restrictive version used in upstream TeX Live 2009 indeed.
Later versions of TeX Live make more permissive definitions:

2010:
% Lua needs to look in TEXINPUTS for lua scripts distributed with packages.
LUAINPUTS = .;$TEXMF/scripts/{$progname,$engine,}/{lua,}//;$TEXINPUTS

2011:
% Lua needs to look in TEXINPUTS for lua scripts distributed with packages.
%
% But we can't simply use $TEXINPUTS, since then if TEXINPUTS is set in
% the environment with a colon, say, TEXINPUTS=/some/dir:, the intended
% default expansion of TEXINPUTS will not happen and .lua files under
% the /tex/ will not be found.
%
% So, duplicate the TEXINPUTS.*lualatex values as LUAINPUTS.*lualatex.
% The default LUAINPUTS sufficess for luatex and dviluatex.
%
LUAINPUTS.lualatex =
.;$TEXMF/scripts/{$progname,$engine,}/{lua,}//;$TEXMF/tex/{lualatex,latex,luatex,generic,}//
LUAINPUTS.dvilualatex =
.;$TEXMF/scripts/{$progname,$engine,}/{lua,}//;$TEXMF/tex/{lualatex,latex,luatex,generic,}//
LUAINPUTS =
.;$TEXMF/scripts/{$progname,$engine,}/{lua,}//;$TEXMF/tex/{luatex,plain,generic,}//

As noted in the comments, some packages out there rely on them, especially the
facts that TEXINPUTS is searched, and that the /lua/ component in TEXMF/scripts
is not mandatory any more.

Of course, the versions shipped in TeX Live 2009 don't, but people may want to
install new packages (or more recent versions) in their local tree to take
advantage of the very recent version of LuaTeX shipped in Debian (testing).

So, I suggest you consider updating LUAINPUTS to allow people to fully benefit
from the recent versions of LuaTeX.

Thanks,
Manuel.