Hi Fabrice and Eric,

A long over due response. Apologies.

I got a unanimous answer about not putting the conditional statements in
the code block header, that was reassuring =). I guess the use case here is
if you have different configurations for different users or machines or
something similar.

I looked at the code I was shown. I noticed there was some pieces missing
but even though adding them I could not get the code to work properly. I
figured it was due to me using el-get for my packages and no packages are
actually required, but somehow autoloaded instead, by the el-get setup, or
it's just a matter of me being a noob elisper.

Anyway,  when I was fiddling around with the code I stumbled upon el-gets
built in functions. I noticed that, of course, el-get has functions for
checking install status of packages. My current solution therefore looks
like this:
(if (el-get-package-exists-p "<package>")
      (do stuff) )

which seems to work well for now but is not optimal. Of course it's only
works with el-get installed packages but I'll have to live with it for now.

Thanks Fabrice and Eric for your swift responses.

Regards

Andreas