[wp-trac] [WordPress Trac] #36949: Term exists should use get_terms internally

[WordPress Trac]

#36949: Term exists should use get_terms internally
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 Reporter:  spacedmonkey  |       Owner:
     Type:  enhancement   |      Status:  new
 Priority:  normal        |   Milestone:  Future Release
Component:  Taxonomy      |     Version:  2.3
 Severity:  normal        |  Resolution:
 Keywords:  has-patch     |     Focuses:  performance
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Comment (by boonebgorges):

 [attachment:36949.3.patch] includes some formatting cleanup.

 I looked into one of the failures -
 `Tests_Import_Import::test_small_import()`. What's happening here is that
 the importer suspends cache validation, such that parent-term lookups fail
 during bulk term import. So here's a real-life instance of the kind of
 case [comment:2 I hypothesized above]. I assume the other failures are
 similar. We have a couple options available.

 1. Don't suspend cache invalidation for bulk operations.
 2. Don't use `term_exists()` during bulk operations. (We'd use some
 version that skips the cache.)
 3. Don't change the behavior of `term_exists()`

 It's fairly easy to make the internal changes necessary for 1 and 2, but
 both are going to cause serious problems for third-party libraries that
 suspend cache invalidation for imports and other bulk operations.

 I think `term_exists()` is not a great function anyway, and I wouldn't
 mind if we moved away from its use in core. If we phased out our own
 internal uses, we could replace them with functions that leverage the
 cache, and also demonstrate the proper way to handle bulk operations
 (perhaps those would continue to use `term_exists()`?).

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Ticket URL: <https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/36949#comment:4>
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