Recoll won't start

Whenever I try to open recoll, I get a popup box with this message:

Configuration problem: Configuration could not be built:Explicitly specified configuration must exist (won't be automatically created)

and I get this as stderr:

$ recollGot bus address:  "unix:abstract=/tmp/dbus-GO0LJ4yYcr,guid=e695867e0d6df401c0df2baf0000dd87" Connected to accessibility bus at:  "unix:abstract=/tmp/dbus-GO0LJ4yYcr,guid=e695867e0d6df401c0df2baf0000dd87" Registered DEC:  true :4:main.cpp:143:recollCleanup: writing settings

I've tried deleting the .recoll folder and running sudo apt-get purge recoll && sudo apt-get install recoll, but they didn't help.

Update: version information.

$ apt-cache policy recollrecoll:  Installed: 1.16.2-1  Candidate: 1.16.2-1  Version table: *** 1.16.2-1 0        500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise/universe i386 Packages        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status$ lsb_release -aNo LSB modules are available.Distributor ID: UbuntuDescription:    Ubuntu 12.04.3 LTSRelease:    12.04Codename:   precise

Update 2: Created bug report.

https://bitbucket.org/medoc/recoll/issue/168/recoll-wont-load-even-after-removing

Addendum: the issue was that I had this in my ~/.profile:

export RECOLL_CONFDIR='~/.recoll'

Since the ~/.recoll folder didn't already exist on my system, recoll quite reasonably showed an error.