His suggestion is to disable the loading+ initializing based on an environment variable.
> initialization step in startup.el, completely bypassing issues like init
> code possibly getting added multiple times to the file and the general
> annoyance as this cluttering cannot be disabled at all and can happen at
> every installation) and involves more work.
We discussed this already. There's the issue of configuring package.el
before loading it and/or before calling package-initialize.
Stefan