On Sat, Dec 9, 2017 at 1:11 PM Ruy Exel <ruyexel@gmail.com> wrote:

> Dear Kaushal,
>
> The real treat is to read your nice message and to be a member of such a
> fantastic group of people!
>
> Following your advice to stick to a stable release I searched for info on
> how to install it and I found instructions in
> http://orgmode.org/org.html#Installation telling me to run "M-x
> package-install RET org RET" from within emacs.  I did it and it all looked
> like everything was running smoothly untill I was issued the messages:
>
> WARNING: No org-loaddefs.el file could be found from where org.el is
> loaded.  You need to run "make" or "make autoloads" from Org lisp directory
>

Did you add Org Elpa to package archives as described here:
http://orgmode.org/elpa.html ?

I am used to this since I first tried the cloned git version, but I noticed
> that there is no Makefile in the directory containing the newly dowloaded
> files (~/.emacs.d/elpa/org-20171113/), so I got stuck.
>

I haven't installed Org from within Emacs for quite some time now as I
build it using make from its git clone. Also I haven't seen the warning
that you see. Hopefully someone else can comment on that part.

I noticed though that the Org version you quoted:
~/.emacs.d/elpa/org-20171113/ is a bit old (not too old, but not the latest
served on Elpa either). If you add the Org Elpa to package-archive as I
suggested above, and install using the M-x package-list-packages interface,
the archives will first get auto-refreshed, and then you can be rest
assured that the installed packages are the latest versions.


> I noticed that in the above installation instructions it is mentioned that:
>
> Important: you need to do this in a session where no .org file has been
> visited, i.e., where no Org built-in function have been loaded. Otherwise
> autoload Org functions will mess up the installation.
>
> so I repeated the process right after starting emacs with the
> --no-init-files option, then I added the line "(package-initialize)" to my
> initialization file but it still does not work,
>

What doesn't work? You shouldn't need to do --no-init-files. Simply make
sure that your config is not doing (require 'org) directly or indirectly
somewhere and you are not opening an Org file at emacs startup. That's all.


> namely the old org-mode is loaded upon starting emacs.
>

How are you telling that? If you do M-: (featurep 'org) and it returns nil,
it means that org is not yet loaded.


>   It is curious that I now have two org-mode entries in the top Emacs-Info
> node, one for the old version (7.9.3f) and another one for the new one
> (9.1.2 (release_9.1.2-37-g3f8d67)).
>

That's a different thing, has to do with the Info-directory-list variable,
and is fine. You can have paths to Info manuals from multiple Org versions
added to that var, and so you will see multiple Org manuals. I personally
don't like that and so I surgically remove[1] all the Org versions that I
am not using in the current emacs session from load-path and
Info-directory-list.

Could I have premanently messed up my emacs installation by not following
> the above Important advice?
>

Not trying to sound philosophical, but nothing is permanent. All the
package installations happen in the elpa dir.. so to start the Org
installation from scratch, you can rm -rf all the org installations from
the elpa/ dir and restart emacs following that "Important" instruction and
retry installing Org.

[1]: https://scripter.co/building-org-development-version/
-- 

Kaushal Modi