I'm willing to believe you guys in terms of assigning blame, since it seems reasonable to assume that the "watch" functionality is what's causing this trouble, especially if it's left on for days at a time.
That said:
(a) I didn't do anything with the .tcl files after turning on the watch. But at some point, the watching began to ignore chnages to the files, and kept the in-memory version. It's almost as if watching was turned off in practice, but kept on as far as the system flags were concerned.
(b) It sounds reasonable that watches should only be active for a short period of time. The performance issues with watches were always obvious to me, but on a development machine, I didn't really care. Indeed, with a lot of changes going on, I found it very useful and helpful to keep a file watched for long periods of time -- days or weeks. It might be nice to warn people against keeping watches active for more than a short period of time.
In other words: Yeah, I shouldn't have kept the watching on for so long, and I'll avoid doing that in the future. But I feel like hackers should get a warning about keeping watches active for too long, because there does seem to be some sort of corruption/caching issue here, and I would hate for someone else to encounter the same problem in the future.
Reuven
