emacs marmalade: "Cannot open load file", "package"

Question

I'm using emacs 24 and would like to install marmalade.

I've tried adding the following to my ~/.emacs file, as per the instructions on http://marmalade-repo.org/:

(require 'package)
(add-to-list 'package-archives 
    '("marmalade" .
      "http://marmalade-repo.org/packages/"))
(package-initialize)

When I try to reload e-macs I get the error:

Error in init file: File error: "Cannot open load file", "package".

What might be wrong?

Answer 1

Sounds like your version of Emacs does not come with library package.el. Does M-x find-library package find it? If not, you can try downloading it from the web (maybe start with Emacs Wiki), and then putting it in your load-path.

But even in that case it might not work with your Emacs version.

Answer 2

I got this message when I installed the latest emacs (26) from homebrew, and ran it. The problem was that OS X comes with a really old emacs (22). That was what was running when I ran emacs.

I assume that the new emacs wasn't linked in my current terminal. I fixed this problem by just opening a new terminal and running emacs from there.

Answer 3

I had this error message after I'd switched from macports to homebrew package management on the mac.

I suspect I'd installed emacs using macports, and although it was still available after removing macports, I may have removed the libraries I was relying on. Installing the newest version of emacs via homebrew fixed the problem.

Re-install emacs if you think you might have done something similarly foolish.