On 6/12/05, Jamie Bliss astronouth7303@gmail.com wrote:
What exactly is the difference between a cache purge and a null edit (besides the entry in recentchanges)?
One difference that I know of is that a null edit will cause any category links within a template on the page to be re-examined.
Changing a template to either add or remove a category link does not recategorize any pages which transclude the template until the page itself is re-saved. I think that this is because categorizing a page involves database updates, and it would be too expensive to do this everytime a page with a template was rendered for viewing. Purging the cache just causes re-rendering of pages.