In the installation whose prefix is other than /usr/local,
osxfuse library and include path must explicitly be specified during build.
Although brew's pkg-config is configured to prepend appropriates paths,
the prepended paths (/usr/local) supercede the original HOMEBREW_PREFIX.
This behavior will cause the linker to select libraries outside brew's tree.
By adding /usr/local to HOMEBREW_LIBRARY_PATHS, superenv ensures that appears
only after the HOMEBREW_PREFIX, and thus fixes this problem.
HOMEBREW_INCLUDE_PATHS is also configured like keg-only Formulae.
This is the (partially) documented public API for Homebrew.
The main class you should look at is the {Formula} class (and classes linked from there). That's the class that's used to create Homebrew formulae (i.e. package descriptions). Assume anything else you stumble upon is private.