Re: Emacs and XDG Base Dir Spec was: persistent storage for Emacs packages

[Josh <josh@foxtail.org>]

On Mon, Oct 21, 2013 at 12:37 PM, Stefan Monnier
<monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:
>> From Stefan's comment it sounds as if I should pull everything out of
>> .emacs.d except init and elpa. But it's convenient for me to have emacs in
>> its own contained world on my computer. Is there a risk of breaking
>> something with this approach?
>
> The problem with adding ~/.emacs.d to your load-path is one
> of namespace.  E.g. Gnus expects ~/.emacs.d/gnus.el to be the user's
> Gnus config.  So if you have such a file and add ~/.emacs.d to your
> load-path, you'll have a conflict where (load "gnus") will load your
> Gnus config file rather then loading Gnus proper.

I do not mean to nitpick, but this is the first I have heard that load-path
should not include ~/.emacs.d (or I suppose more generally
user-emacs-directory), so I would like to understand the thinking here.
I see the following in trunk:

    gnus-init-file is a variable defined in `gnus-start.el'.
    Its value is "~/.gnus"

    Documentation:
    Your Gnus Emacs-Lisp startup file name.
    If a file with the `.el' or `.elc' suffixes exists, it will be read instead.

    You can customize this variable.

Leaving aside the fact that this file is located by default in ~ instead of
~/.emacs.d, it seems that the config filename's leading dot would obviate
any namespace issue.  If that is so, are there any concrete examples of
trouble that could result from ~/.emacs.d's presence in load-path?