I wanted to mention (as the author of Zowie) that I’ve also noticed a few rare instances of Finder comments not showing up in DEVONthink. I have not been able to find a definite cause, but here is something that I noticed just a couple of days ago:
It seemed that if I went into the Finder, opened the file info panel, and did something to the Finder comments box that would cause an update (e.g., add a space and delete it again), then it caused DEVONthink to “notice” the comment – it would show up in the DEVONthink inspector.
That’s as far as I’ve gotten because the issue is so hard to study: I can’t make the situation arise deliberately (it’s so rare to begin with), and the tests I did to get this far eliminated the few cases of missing finder comments that I had at all. Based on this thin evidence, though, my suspicions are in the direction of something wonky happening with the macOS metadata system (that whole mdls thing).
What Zowie does to write the comments is to use AppleScript, and a 3 step process: read any existing comment, clear the existing comment, and finally, write the new comment. If anyone wants to see the code exactly, it’s here:
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AppleScript code: https://github.com/mhucka/zowie/blob/0603a6582bdca9c9e73f5b90b7dc916f758fd669/zowie/methods/findercomment.py#L36-L53
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Sequence of events when writing updated comments: https://github.com/mhucka/zowie/blob/0603a6582bdca9c9e73f5b90b7dc916f758fd669/zowie/methods/findercomment.py#L128-L132