Emacs 24 Package System Initialization Problems

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It’s worth noting why Emacs defers the package initialization:

See C-hig (emacs) Package Installation RET, and in particular:

The reason automatic package loading occurs after loading the init
file is that user options only receive their customized values after
loading the init file, including user options which affect the
packaging system. In some circumstances, you may want to load packages
explicitly in your init file (usually because some other code in your
init file depends on a package). In that case, your init file should
call the function package-initialize. It is up to you to ensure that
relevant user options, such as package-load-list (see below), are set
up prior to the package-initialize call. You should also set
package-enable-at-startup to nil, to avoid loading the packages
again after processing the init file. Alternatively, you may choose to
completely inhibit package loading at startup, and invoke the command
M-x package-initialize to load your packages manually.

So provided you make sure that your init file takes care of any non-default values you want for variables in the package customization group1 before calling package-initialize — and that you maintain this approach whenever customizing the package library config — it should be okay to do this.

Alternatively, because after-init-hook runs after the standard package initialization has completed, you could use that to evaluate any init code which depends upon packages. So instead of calling package-initialize directly in init.el, you could instead write:

(add-hook 'after-init-hook 'my-after-init-hook)
(defun my-after-init-hook ()
  ;; do things after package initialization
  )

putting the code requiring the initialized package system within that function.

YMMV.

(n.b. I haven’t tested the after-init approach, as I don’t really use package.el; but I did confirm the sequence of events in the start-up code, so I believe it will work as described.)

1 M-x customize-group RET package RET

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