Thanks for your status update.

While you should be able to use the devel branch on systems that you control, submitting a patch for SVN::Log::Index would be problematic: unfortunately, adding features such as SortSpec to KS necessitated changing both the file format and the API in ways that are not backwards compatible.

That's not a problem in this case, because my patch doesn't add a "sort by" feature, but rather allows to pass arbitrary queries to KinoSearch - the module user is then responsible for doing the right thing, depending on his KinoSearch version.