Another question: what part of the LuaTeX chain is responsible for locating the configuration files? Is it the scripts mtxrun.lua and luatools.lua or the binary texlua itself? You mentioned something about luatools only but now that Hans uploaded the entire beta ...
this is done in the lua code and taco and i spent quit esome time experimenting with this; our filosophy is to hard code as less as possible and let lud du the work unless this is not possible; here we have a border case with these symlinks; an option would to add functions that provide info about the symlink, but then, we don;t wan tto add too many functions to the core; hoever in this case it may be that we need to let the binary provide info about the path where the binary resides (also because it may be a bit playform depedent)
Who's "lud"?
(btw, the lua code is in luat-inp but merged into mtxrun and luatools so that these scripts can operate independent of libraries, because otherwise we can have another chicken or egg problem)
Good to know ...
at some point part of the interface in luat-inp will be public i.e. users can use it themselves, but first i need to clean up that code
Sure :-) Oliver