44.7 Get built-in packages and versions

Emacs ships built-in packages which may also be packaged externally on ELPA. Knowing whether a built-in package has a higher version than on ELPA or other packaging systems may be useful for external packaging tools. Lisp programs which would like to query such information can use the following functions.

Function: package-versioned-builtin-packages

This function returns the list of packages that are built into Emacs and have a version. The returned list contains one symbol for each built-in package that has a version, which are likely also packaged externally on ELPA.

Function: package-builtin-package-version package

This function returns the version of a built-in package. package should be a symbol. The returned value is a list of integers representing the version of PACKAGE in the format returned by the function version-to-list, or nil if package is built-in but has no version, or is not a built-in package.