"My Computer, was the Provider itself"?

[geary]

This is Retrospect Version 19.3.0 (132) running on MacOS 13.6.6, but I've seen this log message for some years on earlier versions of Retrospect on both my current Mac Studio and previously on my 2010 Mac Pro running 10.14.

I see in the Retrospect log file many lines like this:

[*] Provider::ProController: Controller for Refnum 8,888, child of 183: My Computer, was the Provider itself

Sometimes followed by something like "and 12,099 others".  The Refnum number varies among a small number of different values.

What does it all mean?