bug#25163: 26.0.50; Unable to access `user-emacs-directory' (~/.emacs.d/)

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Richard Kim <emacs18@gmail.com>
> Date: Mon, 12 Dec 2016 18:19:33 -0800
> Cc: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>, 25163@debbugs.gnu.org
> 
> For the first 25 or so years, I used ~/.emacs to customize emacs.
> However for the past few years I switched to using "eamacs -q --eval ...
> --eval ... " style. This decision was not because of my ignorance of
> other command line options that emacs provides. Instead this style gave
> me the flexibility to generate elisp on the fly to setup emacs exactly
> the way I want without having to edit any files. I happen to use python
> script that takes few command line arguments, which then may generate
> elisp files, and/or generate appropriate --eval arguments.

Setting things up in your ~/.emacs and making the same settings via --eval
or --load produces subtly different results for some options.  That's because 
Emacs processes the user settings in ~/.emacs specially, sometimes
evaluating the same setting more than once, to provide the expected effects,
This special processing is not done for the other methods of specifying
initial settings.

So when you made that switch, you already changed the way your
sessions are set up.  You might not paid attention to this aspect,
because for most options the effect is identical.  But the difference
is there nonetheless, and it's real.

The above isn't meant to invalidate your report in any way, just to
explain that .emacs and --eval, as designed and implemented, sometimes
produce different results.