finding dependents of a shared library

[René J.V. Bertin]

Hi,

Not really MacPorts related, or rather, this goes beyond:

The question came up "how to find any/all binary files that link to this or that shared library". I think we discussed this a bit before before, I remember describing my kludgy way to answer that question for a library provided by a port (move it aside and then run a verbose rev-upgrade to see what errors I get).

AFAIK the way rev-upgrade works is
- rev-upgrade scans a list of all supposed-to-be-present binary files
- for each file on that list it determines the list of dependencies (or list of deps provided by active ports)
- for each of the dependencies on that list it checks if the file is present (and will load).

It seems to me that we thus have the basic features available to write a SpotLight importer for MachO binary files which would enter this reverse dependency information in the SpotLight database. IOW, associate the dependent to each found dependency.

Does that sound like a feasible and useful idea (and one that won't overload SpotLight)? Or maybe someone already invented this wheel (wouldn't that be nice :))?

Thanks,
René