I moved from my older, cumbersome emacs setup to a package.el based one. I currently use an Emacs 24.3
build
for Mac OS X (which comes with package.el). Its cleaner -
- I just list the packages I need in my init file - no submodules business
- Run through the list to find if a package is installed or not. If not, download and install package from elpa/melpa/marmalade
- For now, an added manual step when removing a package is to delete related folder from the /elpa/ directory
Here’s a gist which explains (I maintain this setup at github)