curious: need explicit package-initialize in recent v29.x

[Eric S Fraga]

Hello all,

I track git Emacs.  Yesterday, I git pulled and built Emacs.  It
wouldn't start with my init files.  -Q worked just fine.

After some debugging, it led me to adding the line

(package-initialize)

as the first line of my .emacs.  I do have an early-init.el file as
well which configures the repositories to use.

Previously, it seemed that the package system was initialised by Emacs
itself automatically between the evaluation of the early-init.el and
.emacs files.  Has this changed or is my problem a symptom of something
else?

Thank you,
eric

-- 
Eric S Fraga with org 9.5.2 in Emacs 29.0.50 on Debian 11.2