[Feature]: Allow disabling of TypeMap caching

[rly]

What would you like to see added to PyNWB?

When a user or developer imports PyNWB for the first time, the type map is loaded and automatically cached in a pickle file in the package in order to speed up load times for future imports. However, this is problematic for developers who are modifying the schema and not seeing those changes reflected because the type map has been loaded from the cache instead of being generated anew. It is very confusing. I would like to be able to turn off loading the type map from cache, perhaps through setting an environment variable after I clone PyNWB onto my laptop.

@mavaylon1 and I looked into other options, such as disabling the type map cache when installing in editable mode, but those did not seem to be foolproof across all various use cases (running tests not in editable mode, users installing from source), so we thought that explicitly setting an environment variable and documenting that in the developer instructions would be the most straightforward.

Is your feature request related to a problem?

No response

What solution would you like?

^

Do you have any interest in helping implement the feature?

Yes.

Code of Conduct

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