RE: "Emacs Lisp Packages" chapter in the Emacs manual

[Drew Adams]

> I'll check what Drew mentioned earlier, ie references in the manual
> before package.el was provided and will try to rewrite the thing.

I didn't find a lot, but there is more mention of "(require ".
I was surprised that I didn't find something like what you're
proposing.

There's a good explanation of this idiom,
at least, in `Named Features' (still there):

 (provide 'my-feature)  ; Ignored by byte compiler,
                        ;   evaluated by 'load'.
 (require 'my-feature)  ; Evaluated by byte compiler.