Location of .gnus init file

[Rainer Thiel]

I am keeping my home directory ~/ synchronized through several machines
and am trying to place the .gnus init file elsewhere than in ~/.  This
works fine when I put

   > (setq gnus-init-file "C:/Emacs-local/.gnus.d/.gnus.el")
   > (setq gnus-directory "C:/Emacs-local/.gnus.d/")
   > (setq gnus-home-directory "C:/Emacs-local/.gnus.d/")
   > (setq gnus-startup-file (concat gnus-home-directory ".newsrc"))

in my .emacs init file.  In this case, emacs/gnus reads .gnus.el from
C:/Emacs-local/.gnus.d/ and writes/reads .newsrc and .newsrc.eld to/from
this very directory, as expected.

So far, so good.  As I'd prefer to configure gnus on a machine-dependent
basis, I tried to put the code cited above in my site-start.el.  This
does not have the desired effect, though.

Can someone please tell me why, and what I could do?

Many thanks in advance

Rainer
-- 
Prof. Dr. Rainer Thiel
Institut für Altertumswissenschaften
07737 Jena, Germany (EU)
r.thiel@uni-jena.de