48.2 Package Statuses

A package can have one of the following statuses:

‘ available’

The package is not installed, but can be downloaded and installed from the package archive.

‘ avail-obso’

The package is available for installation, but a newer version is also available. Packages with this status are hidden by default.

‘ built-in’

The package is included in Emacs by default. It cannot be deleted through the package menu, and is not considered for upgrading.

‘ dependency’

The package was installed automatically to satisfy a dependency of another package.

‘ disabled’

The package has been disabled using the package-load-list variable.

‘ external’

The package is not built-in and not from the directory specified by package-user-dir (see Package Files and Directory Layout). External packages are treated much like ‘ built-in’ packages and cannot be deleted.

‘ held’

The package is held, See Package Installation.

‘ incompat’

The package cannot be installed for some reason, for example because it depends on uninstallable packages.

‘ installed’

The package is installed.

‘ new’

Equivalent to ‘ available’, except that the package became newly available on the package archive after your last invocation of M-x list-packages.

‘ obsolete’

The package is an outdated installed version; in addition to this version of the package, a newer version is also installed.