Drupal 6 will make extensive use of caching mechanisms (in menu, variables, ...) and _registry hooks (modules, themes, ...). While this is nice for a fast Drupal site, its getting more difficult for developers to write and debug modules. For example you cant change the menu path and see the immediate effect, you cant (in future) add a hook to your module and see the immediate result, ... I think you got the point.
It would be nice IMO to have a switch, e.g. a variable or define (in bootstrap.inc?), which - when enabled - forces Drupal to bypass the caches and always load everything from scratch. I guess this would make a page load incredible slow, but it could speed up the development process. We could have multiple switches (array?) to force reload certain things.
e.g.

 $debug = array(
  'menu' => TRUE/FALSE,
  ...
);

Instead of a hardcoded switch, we could also have the variable defined in e.g. devel.module. Thoughs?

How many of such mechanisms (cache, registry) will be implemented in Drupal 6? How much additional code would be required to bypass? I dont think the few additional lines for this feature would have great impact on a 'normal' page load, but this surely needs to be evaluated ...

Comments

eaton’s picture

eaton commented

One way is to write a quick-and-dirty cache-bypass.inc file that implements dummy versions of cache_set(), cache_get(), and cache_clear_all(). Return FALSE for all three functions.

Then, in your settings.php file, set the 'cache_inc' config variable to '.path-to-include-file/cache-bypass.inc'.

That will immediately bypass ALL caching mechanisms. It'll make things slower, but you'll never worry about clearing the cache again. ;-)

profix898’s picture

profix898 commented
Status: Active » Closed (duplicate)

Marking this 'duplicate' of http://drupal.org/node/195173