[MiKTeX] I am not a MiKTeX user ..

[CTAN m. J. H. <ftp...@al...>]

.. but as one of the CTAN folks, I need to describe to people where to
install materials.  I'd like to give them a foolproof (and short) answer
for how to find their local tree.  I've figured out how to do that for
TeX Live.  Please, can I ask what is recommended under MiKTeX?

I downloaded MiKTeX 2.7 yesterday since I understood that was the
current stable version.  At a command prompt I ran
  kpsewhich.exe --expand-path=$TEXMFLOCAL
and it gave me an answer that is a directory, so I thought that was
right.  But as part of a discussion I am having on this (details not
relevant) someone asserted that was not correct, and indeed I see that
kpsewhich.exe --help refers to that option as depreciated.  Will it
vanish in 2.8? 

In the manual
  http://docs.miktex.org/manual/localadditions.html
I see a discussion of a list of trees, but I don't see how local is
distinguished from possibly-MiKTeX-overwritten trees.  No doubt I just
looked right past something.  Could someone set me striaght?

Thanks,
Jim Hefferon