xref-find-references returns duplicates

[Petteri Hintsanen]

Hello list,

I discovered a somewhat peculiar case where xref-find-references returns 
duplicate references for elisp symbols.

Here is a toy example:

1. Create a file ~/foo/bar/bar.el with contents:

  (defun bar-f ())

  (defun bar-g ()
    (bar-f))

  (provide 'bar)

2. Create a git repo in ~/foo/bar and commit bar.el.  This is just to 
set up a project that Emacs can recognize.

3. Start emacs -Q and eval

  (add-to-list 'load-path "~/foo")
  (add-to-list 'load-path "~/foo/bar")
  (require 'bar)

4. Visit ~/foo/bar/bar.el and do xref-find-references for bar-f

On my machine I get

  bar.el
  1: (defun bar-f ())
  4:   (bar-f))
  1: (defun bar-f ())
  4:   (bar-f))

i.e. references are duplicated.  The issue seems to be in load-path: if 
I remove ~/foo from step (3) above, then I don't see any duplicates.

Am I abusing load-path somehow, or is this a bug, or something else?
Emacs version is 28.2, running on Debian.


(The real use case is elisp directory hierarchy like this

  ~/elisp/
  ~/elisp/package-a/
  ~/elisp/package-b/
  ~/elisp/package-c/
  ...

where package dirs are checkouts from various repositories, and all 
directories are added to load-path.  ~/elisp/ has miscellaneous files 
which do not belong to any package.  I guess I could work around this 
just by putting them to ~/elisp/etc/ or something, but I'd like to know 
why xref works here like it does.)



Thanks,
Petteri