Apparently, though unproven, at 20:13 on Friday 19 November 2010, BRM did opine thusly:
> > My guess is that it scans every time you restart to be sure nothing > > changed while it was shutdown. It doesn't know if you've dual-booted, > > logged into xfce, mounted the disk in another machine, had fsck remove > > files, etc. > > > > > > > > I think Tracker behaves the same way in gnome-land. > > To add to it - Nepomuk has two parts (according to > http://nepomuk.kde.org/node/2) that seem to be active in here: > 1. Strigi - > http://techbase.kde.org/Development/Tutorials/Metadata/Nepomuk/StrigiServic > e 2. FileWatchService - > http://techbase.kde.org/Development/Tutorials/Metadata/Nepomuk/FileWatchSer > vice > > From the FileWatchService info: > > "However: due to the restrictions of all file watching systems available > (systems such as inotify are restricted to 8000 something watches, fam > does not support file moving monitoring, etc.) the service mostly relies > on KDirNotify. Thus, all operations performed by KDE applications through > KIO are monitored while all other operations (such as console commands) > are missed." > > So it really does need to check up on things during restart to get back in > sync, but also to find what it didn't know about from info not going > through an interface it is aware of. Well at least that explains the reason for the current state of affairs. Thanks for the find. -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
