I have spent some time modernizing Pinot, and version 1.20 is the end result.
See the NEWS file for details. User-side highlights are:
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giomm >= 2.6, gtkmm >= 3.24 and Xapian >= 1.4.10 are required 
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the gtk2 UI was replaced with a gtk3 UI is loaded off a XML file 
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GNOME Shell search provider interface (v2) was implemented. The file installed at /usr/share/gnome-shell/search-providers/com.github.fabricecolin.Pinot.search-provider.ini enables selecting Pinot as a search provider in GNOME Settings. This means that anything the daemon has indexed (i.e. the contents of the My Documents index) can be searched through the GNOME search box. 
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a bunch of .src plugins were dropped, Arxiv.src was added 
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RST files are processed with rst2txt instead of rst2html 
Re-indexing is heavily recommended. See the README's "How to reset indexes" section.
Grab a tarball at https://github.com/FabriceColin/pinot/releases/tag/1.20 
 
