I've got a privately built xapian 4.0 in my $HOME/opt/xapian-core-1.4.0
dir, and its bin dir in my path.

xapian-config is working like this:

% xapian-config --libs
-L/usr/local/google/home/marmstrong/opt/xapian-core-1.4.0/lib -lxapian

Then "./configure; make" doesn't produce a functioning build unless I
run notmuch's make one of these two ways:

1) make LDFLAGS=-Wl,-rpath-link,$HOME/opt/xapian-core-1.4.0/lib
2) LD_RUN_PATH=$HOME/opt/xapian-core-1.4.0/lib make

I can live with that, but it brings back decade old memories.  Is there
a better way?

(I don't want to get into packaging up a xapian 1.4 .deb and installing
it on my box just to build notmuch)