afaik Minion scans your addons in the live/AddOns folder once you install Minion. It recognizes the txt files of the addons and read the "## Version: " tag.
Then it will create a minion.XML file and store the scanned data in it, updating the xml as newer versions are available on
www.esoui.com -> comparing the version of the addon at esoui to the xml file.
I'm not sure if Minion will rescan the txt files after it had done this at installation, but I doubt it. I think someone said it uses the internal data in the XML only to compare the versions. I guess it will also check for the existance of the folders in live/AddOns to see if an addon got deleted manually.