*Randomly* Disapearing Modules

OK,
This is not a problem but some advice for collaborative development that caused myself and a colleague some seriously crazy headscratching and ultimately gave us a rocking good laugh because we turned out to be the source each others problemes.

The setup:

Dev 1 -- localhost copy of drupal, shared database
Dev 2 -- localhost copy of drupal, shared database

Sympom: I enabled my new module, a few minutes later it is gone! menu_router wiped, the works. So I re-enabled it, it stayed around a lot longer, then it went away again... repeat several times over the course of the day. To add to the chaos my dev. colleague was experiencing the same problems.

Boy did we call Drupal a few interesting names... until... we realised... just how.... CHUFFING DUMB WE WERE!

The Mystery: Drupals saves module states in the system table, but on inspecting the includes/module.inc file, it turns out that it scans the *local* filesystem to decide which modules exist at all, something we are now painfully aware of and will take to the grave. LOL.

Given that I was developing module A, and he was devloping module B, fresh code, neither of us having a copy of the others work, it turned out that when he enabled his module, the database dropped all knowledge of mine as it was not present on his system and vice versa!

So, I thought "I will re-enable mine" and consequently dropped his from the system.
Then he noticed his was gone and re-enabled his. Mine went away again.
Repeat the above until you realise you are in the wrong job.

Repeat this a few dozen times with constant interruptions and you can imagine the state we were in until we realised what was happening.

Given that we sit next to each-other it is even more depressing that it took us that long to figure out.
Oh how we laughed.

Cheers.
Sean Charles