ELPA

ELPA is the Emacs Lisp Package Archive, by TomTromey.

ELPA

“Our goal is to make it simple to install, use, and upgrade Emacs Lisp packages. We supply package.el, a simple package manager for Emacs, and a repository of pre-packed Emacs Lisp code.”

package.el (from ELPA) will be added to vanilla GnuEmacs, version 24. As of 2010-06-18, package.el has been merged with the development version of Emacs, and an ELPA repository has been set up at http://elpa.gnu.org/.

The Emacs version of package.el will support multiple repositories. You can use the global ELPA plus the Emacs GNU repository like this:

 (setq package-archives '(("ELPA" . "http://tromey.com/elpa/") 
                          ("gnu" . "http://elpa.gnu.org/packages/")))

The old URL, for historical purposes is at: http://tromey.com/elpa/

See also 2010-11-15 discussion about ELPA in Emacs 24.x at http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.devel/132634/focus=132640

Marmalade

Marmalade, a package.el friendly community package source that allows users to upload their own packages. Package maintainers don’t have to be the same as the maintainers of the original code.

Some packages (for instance, slime) are out of date however.

Melpa

See also MELPA at http://melpa.milkbox.net/

Melpa uses a recipe system similar to el-get. Recipes are stored on a git-hub repository which tells the updated package.el how to download each package. The source of the package might be from git, svn, darcs or this wiki.