Error with Kieran Healy's emacs starter kit - emacs

Question

I have installed Kieran Healy's emacs social sciences starter kit. I have changed the name of the file kjhealy.org to ljs.org (as per his instructions). The starter kit settings seem to load, but I get the following error.
Warning (initialization): An error occurred while loading
‘/Users/ljs/.emacs.d/init.el’:
File error: Cannot open load file, No such file or directory, ob-shell
When I open emacs with the --debug-init files, I get the following:
Debugger entered--Lisp error: (void-function package-initialize)
(package-initialize)
eval-buffer(#<buffer *load*> nil "/Users/ljs/.emacs.d/init.el" nil t)
; Reading at buffer position 403
load-with-code-conversion("/Users/ljs/.emacs.d/init.el"
"/Users/ljs/.emacs.d/init.el" t t)
load("/Users/ljs/.emacs.d/init" t t)
#[nil "^H\205\276^# \306=\203^Q^#\307^H\310Q\202A^#
\311=\2033^#\312\307\313\314#\203#^#\315\202A^#\312\307\313\$
command-line()
normal-top-level()
Any help with this greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

The underlying reason for this problem is that the file ob-sh.el was renamed to ob-shell.el and the corresponding babel language became shell. That happened in version 8.2.5 (more precisely, it's commit 583e7ab17:
$ git describe 583e7ab17
release_8.2.4-332-g583e7ab17
so 332 commits after 8.2.4).
So if your version of emacs is 8.2.4 or earlier, you have to use sh as the babel language and load the file ob-sh.el. For 8.2.5 and later (including the current version that is distributed with emacs), you have to use shell as the babel language and load the file ob-shell.el.
Hope that clarifies.