difficulty installing 7.9 with the new build system: org-version not informative

[Brian van den Broek <brian.van.den.broek@gmail.com>]

Hi all,

tl;dr
I've seemingly managed to install org 7.9, but M-x org-version yields
Org-mode version N/A (N/A @ /home/brian/.emacsd/site-lisp/)

The details:

I've not really been following the new build system discussions, but
was half-ways dreading my first org-mode upgrade unde them :-)

I just downloaded the gz.tar of the newly released 7.9; it untarred to
org-7.9-3-ga986d3.

I did my best to follow the instruction on
<http://orgmode.org/manual/Installation.html> and in local.mk.

I made the changes:

# Where local software is found
# Note, *not* ~/.emacs.d but ~/.emacsd, a dir I created to store my
personal emacs stuff
prefix	= /home/brian/.emacsd

# Where local lisp files go.
lispdir= $(prefix)/site-lisp

# Where local data files go.
datadir = $(prefix)/etc

# Where info files go.
infodir = $(prefix)/info


ORG_MAKE_DOC = info # html pdf
INSTALL_INFO = ginstall-info # Debian: avoid harmless warning message

(Apart from the ORG_MAKE_DOC setting, these are exactly the changes I
have always made to upgrade from one released version to another. I've
tried multiple times both with and without the ORG_MAKE_DOC and
INSTALL_INFO settings.)

I then ran make help, make config, and make install as instructed.
(After the issue described below, I also deleted everything installed
and tried again with sudo make install achieving the same result.)

Once that was done, I launched a fresh emacs, visited an .org file,
and ran M-x org-version. What I got was:

Org-mode version N/A (N/A @ /home/brian/.emacsd/site-lisp/)

This seems to indicate that something went wrong, somewhere.

I'm pretty sure at least some of org 7.9 got installed. On the newly
installed version, I have org-insert-all-links available (via M-x
org-insert-all<TAB>) whereas on the previously installed version of
org-mode, tab completion for this command name does not work.

M-x emacs-version yields:
GNU Emacs 23.2.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 2.20.1) of
2010-12-11 on brahms, modified by Debian

~$ make --version
GNU Make 3.81

The first things I have in my .emacs that are org-related are adding
/home/brian/.emacsd/site-lisp to my load path and then (require
'org-install).

I've little doubt it is operator error, but I am at a loss for how to
proceed. Little help?

Thanks and best,

Brian vdB