Installing Sphinx on Mac OS Leopard

One of my ongoing projects required using Sphinx search engine. While I'm more comfortable with Lucene based solutions (I'm evaluating SOLR currently), I decided to give Sphinx a try.

I have installed Sphinx via MacPorts system and was going to use UltraSphinx Rails plugin. But when I tried to run some test query, it complained, that server version is older than the client version. So, I needed to update Sphinx as UltraSphinx depends on some development release of Sphinx. But when I downloaded sources, configured and issued "make" command, the build failed because there were link problems with iconv library:

Undefined symbols:

  "_iconv_close", referenced from:

      xmlUnknownEncoding(void*, char const*, XML_Encoding*)in libsphinx.a(sphinx.o)

  "_iconv", referenced from:

      xmlUnknownEncoding(void*, char const*, XML_Encoding*)in libsphinx.a(sphinx.o)

  "_iconv_open", referenced from:

      xmlUnknownEncoding(void*, char const*, XML_Encoding*)in libsphinx.a(sphinx.o)

ld: symbol(s) not found

I saw some posts on how to overcome and they suggest downloading and installing iconv library. But I was strongly against doing such things (and also iconv library installed on my system was the latest one), so after some trial-and-error I have figured how to build it: just give standard system's library path precedence:

export LDFLAGS="-L/usr/lib"

./configure

make

sudo make install

Hope this will help somebody.