If everything goes as planned, at some point a "Lucy" CPAN distribution will be released and will eventually replace my loose port of Lucene to Perl/C, KinoSearch. KinoSearch is not going away -- it will continue to be actively maintained at least until it's certain that Lucy is sufficiently feature-rich, mature, and stable to take its place. And although we are starting out fresh with an empty directory, KinoSearch's back end is serving as our template -- as spelled out in the original project proposal -- so it would be fair to characterize the transition as KinoSearch morphing into Lucy. (I'll give Lucy a mention during my upcoming talk at OSCON, Building Search Applications With KinoSearch, but I'm not changing my slides. :) )

Our alliance solves what had been a problem for both KinoSearch and Ferret: they were primarily the work of a single author, and developing and maintaining a port of Lucene is a lot of work. We expect development to progress rapidly, since the primary unsolved engineering challenge is integration, and that's much, much easier than what we've already accomplished.

If you'd like to either contribute or follow the project's progress, mailing list subscription information can be found at http://lucene.apache.org/lucy/mailing_lists.html.