Hiding in the ox-taskjuggler thread is a discussion of some of the problems caused by having contrib bundled up in the org-plus-contrib package. (See that thread for the details.)
However, a general question remains, as asked by Tim Cross, whom I will quote if I may: There are also some other alternatives on the emacs-devel list from when > I asked as a general question regarding package.el and dependencies. > Should be noted that this issue is primarily caused because, fro the > package.el perspective, org-plus-contrib is different to the org > package. Other ELPA/MELPA/etc packages have org as a dependency and not > org-plus-contrib. There is no support in package.el for alternative > dependencies. > I would be interested in understanding the rationale for having > org-plus-contrib rather than just an org package and an org-contrib > package? It should be possible to just have an org-contrib package which > depends on an org package (of same version). This would then avoid this > issue. As this is an obvious solution, I suspect there is something > subtle which unpins the rationale to have an org and org-plus-contrib > package approach, but don't know what that is. So, is there an answer to this good and as-yet unanswered question about unbundling contrib into its own package? cheers, Simon