John Hendy <jw.hendy@gmail.com> writes:
> Would this have an effect if I don't ever run 'make install'?

Since it is added to the load-path during compile it might have
undesirable side-effects if an older org-mode resides at that path.

But, I'm now getting these errors too since I have started Emacs
freshly.  The offending commit is 9ff7f80f51a by Eric Schulte, where he
wraps the defvar definition into eval-when-compile.  This change defines
the variable during compile and gets rid of that error, but then it is
not defined when loading org-mode the first time.  If you do an
org-reload this is rectified (which is why I didn't see the error
yesterday.

The original error during compile-time comes from using the variable in
a macro expansion.  I don't think this is the right thing to do since we
would not want to expand the variable at compile time (it would not be
variable anymore after compilation).  The attached patch seems to
correct this for me.