Getting Xapian installed on a fresh Debian lenny/testing machine was a bit tougher than usual. I kept getting this message while trying to compile the Python bindings:

…_xapian.so: undefined symbol ‘_ZTIN6Xapian13PostingSourceE’

It turns out that lenny ships with a new version of aptitude, one which uses Xapian for search (which is actually pretty cool news). As a result, an older version of Xapian is already installed in /usr/lib and for some reason, the self-compiled version in /usr/local/lib was not being used. In the end, it was apparently a simple cache issue (make sense – you’d assume that the local/-version would take precedence by default, after all), and simply running ldconfig once made it work.

I wasted a couple of hours trying to solve this. On the plus side, I also learned some new things about Linux, so I guess it’s allright 😉