future of baloo, cross-platform desktop search (and finding dependents of a shared library)

[René J.V. Bertin]

Hi,

I seem to recall having read that baloo's future is incertain, inhowfar is that correct and to what extent are there concrete plans to develop something else?

I think there'd be justification for developing a good cross-platfom desktop search engine that applications can use regardless of the platform on which they're running. I'm aware that the "other big 2" platforms have their own desktop search engines, but at least the one Apple provides is not without its flaws. They could of course be used as a backend (I think even the current Baloo framework could be extended to relay queries to them so it actually does something on Mac and MSWin) but that still means that document importer plugins need to be written for each platform.

Anyway, that's not the only reason I'm bringing this up; I ran into a question the other day "how do I find any/all binary files that link to (= depend on) this or that shared library?". 

That's a query to which an answer can be obtained by maintaining a database of the dependency lists of all binaries in the searchable areas, gotten through ldd (otool on Mac). And that's data that one should be able to integrate into a desktop search database.

Does this ring any bells, I'm guessing this should be useful enough to distribution maintainers and OS developers that someone must have implemented a utility?

Thanks,
René