Emacs Lisp-error meaning when trying (require 'package)

Question

I have an init.el file which only consists of a single line

(require 'package)

I am running emacs 23.1 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server Release 6.10 (Santiago)

Execution of emacs --debug-init returns the following screen:

I have absolutely no clue as to what this means.

This was actually a very preliminary step to following the instructions on setting up elpy as IDE for python... After I had no success in using the standard mode with python3 instead of just python

Could it be that these machines cannot access the internet?

Answer 1

package.el is not part of Emacs 23. You can obtain it here, I believe. (That's https://github.com/technomancy/package.el.)

No idea whether that version of the library is compatible out of the box with Emacs 23.

But you get the idea - search for package.el online, download it, and put it in your load-path. Then your require should pick it up.