[gucci-on-fleek]

> so that I don't have to deploy a directory structure

LuaTeX itself doesn't depend on any particular directory structure. kpathsea does expect a certain directory structure, but you don't need to use kpathsea—LuaTeX was primarily developed for ConTeXt, which doesn't use kpathsea at all. Without kpathsea, you'll need to supply the appropriate callbacks in a Lua initialization script, but this is fairly simple.

[Rochus]

Thanks, I've seen that. So far kpathsea didn't get into my way and caused less trouble than the Lua code I had to use to (hopefully) achieve optimal typsetting quality. But kpathsea is indeed on my list of disposable parts.

And for a system like speedata at least the Lua implemented luaotfload machinery had to be accessible somewhere in a known directory. When they now switched to LuaHBTex (as I likely will as well) this dependency can be avoided without losing typesetting quality (as far as I've understood so far).