title: Rails 3: Access to twitter bootstrap variables + mixins without importing it
body: <p>I'm using Rails 3 for the first time (especially asset pipelining and less-rails-bootstrap), so I might be missing some really basic concept here. I've tried two approaches for including the Twitter bootstrap CSS into my project and both have problems.</p>
  
  <p><strong>Approach #1:</strong> <code>app/assets/stylesheets/application.css</code> has <code>require twitter/bootstrap</code>. This includes the bootstrap css file using a separate link/href tag, which is good. However, the <strong>problem</strong> is that in my custom CSS file, say <code>app/stylesheets/mystyles.css</code> I am unable to access variables+mixins defined in less within the bootstrap code, like <code>@gray</code>, <code>.box-shadow</code>, etc.</p>
  
  <p><strong>Approach #2:</strong> Put <code>@import 'twitter/bootstrap'</code> at the top of <code>app/assets/stylesheets/mystyles.css</code>. This allows me to access variables+mixins defined in less (within the bootstrap code), which is good. However, the <strong>problem</strong> is that it pulls in the entire bootstrap CSS at the top of <code>mystyles.css</code> increasing the filesize. If there are a bunch of different stylesheets that <code>@import twitter/ bootstrap</code> it would cause a lot of duplication.</p>
  
  <p>What's the recommended approach for handling this situation?</p>