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I just upgraded GNU Emacs from 23 to 24 on MacOS and some ELPA installed packages stopped working. One of them is AucTeX. Deleting it and reinstalling it through the package manager made it work again, but I don't want to do this by hand for every package. I'm slightly confused that I find nothing about that on the Internet.

Don't the .elc need to be recompiled for a new version of Emacs? Why isn't this a feature of package.el?

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135

You do not need to re-install all packages. The packages itself are likely fine, however, they need to be re-compiled, because Emacs Lisp byte code is generally not compatible across major versions.

To re-compile all packages, type M-: (byte-recompile-directory package-user-dir nil 'force). After restarting Emacs, packages should work fine again.

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My understanding is that byte code compatibility is only an issue if you are downgrading (or similar) to an older major version of Emacs. A newer Emacs version will run byte code compiled by an older Emacs version.
While it is true that emacs byte code maintains backwards compatibility, it is usually a good idea to re-compile, especially when moving to a later major version. The reason is that later major versions often introduce new features and some of these can result in improved performance or functionality.
If you are me and deleted all .elc files, you need to set the ARG argument to 0 like so: (byte-recompile-directory package-user-dir 0 'force)
@Stefan what's the resulting difference between nil and 0? Thank you for the tip.
@Stefan Found it in the man pages: "When a ‘.el’ file has no corresponding ‘.elc’ file, flag says what to do. If it is nil, this command ignores these files. If flag is 0, it compiles them. If it is neither nil nor 0, it asks the user whether to compile each such file, and asks about each subdirectory as well. "
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This works for me on Emacs 25.1 and 26:

(defun package-reinstall-all-activated-packages () "Refresh and reinstall all activated packages." (interactive) (package-refresh-contents) (dolist (package-name package-activated-list) (when (package-installed-p package-name) (unless (ignore-errors ;some packages may fail to install (package-reinstall package-name)) (warn "Package %s failed to reinstall" package-name)))))
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Just M-x reinstall package RET package-name works interactively for one package.
5

The variable package-activated-list holds the list of packages we're interested in. So we just need to install each one again. We don't need to explicitly delete them; calling package-install will blow away an old version.

Put this code in a scratch buffer and evaluate it (that is, put your cursor at the end, and press C-x C-e):

(dolist (package-name package-activated-list) (package-install package-name))
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This fails: Debugger entered--Lisp error: (wrong-type-argument arrayp ac-dabbrev): line 1: package-desc-full-name(ac-dabbrev) line 2: package-install(ac-dabbrev)
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There is now package-recompile-all to re-byte-compile all installed packages, which is a bit shorter than the existing answer.

(package-recompile-all) Byte-compile all installed packages. This is meant to be used only in the case the byte-compiled files are invalid due to changed byte-code, macros or the like. Probably introduced at or before Emacs version 29.1.
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3

my recipe after emacs 25:

  1. in .emacs (define your packages list):
(custom-set-variables '(package-selected-packages (quote (browse-kill-ring helm undo-tree use-package)))
  1. in a terminal:
$ rm -rf ~/.emacs.d/elpa/*
  1. in emacs:
(progn (package-refresh-contents) (package-install-selected-packages) (byte-recompile-directory package-user-dir nil 'force))
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