Speaking of ELPA. For some reason, ELPA did not work for me on MacOsX. I have just bought a mac, have no prior experience with it (my latest experience with an Apple computer is from early 1990s), so that may partially explain it. ELPA on Ubuntu was a snap, however.
As technomancy said, there's no way to tell what the issue was without more info, but was the Mac behind a proxy, by any chance? That was the issue I ran into when I first tried to use ELPA. Solved by setting url-proxy-services in Emacs:
There's not really any way to tell without more details.
Perhaps you were using Aquamacs? Aquamacs is a fork of Emacs that is not very well-supported since it's not cross-platform; it's impossible for people like me to test on. GNU Emacs is much more compatible: http://emacsformacosx.com
Thanks for the hint. I have not been asking for help (there are plenty of places better suited for this, the Clojure community is very supportive). I was simply sharing my experience which I thought would support the point of view expressed by the parent post. Thanks again!
