On May 11, 2013, at 05:06 PM, Robert Park wrote:

>* No support for elisp packages installed by dpkg. This issue is
>unfortunately more complicated than simply twiddling load-path and I'm
>still investigating it. However, I consider this issue quite minor
>because package.el support is *superb* in trunk and I highly recommend
>it's flexibility over the elisp packages installed by dpkg.

Still, I think this would need to be solved to be a serious contender for
replacing the Debian-inherited Emacs package for Ubuntu.  One important reason
is that many sites do not allow downloading and installing packages except
from the OS vendor repositories, so cutting that out would mean that some
users would not have access to 3rd party elisp.

(Python has a similar problem with regards to PyPI, as I'm sure is the case
with other such frameworks.)

-Barry