Depends. In 2009, no. At the end of 2014, yes. :-) It would have been quite
difficult to add translator command line flags to the script pipeline back then,
and the configurable translator constants were a less coherent set back then,
too. The mentioned file no-invariants.patch was already removed from the
repository some years ago after the domain-level constants became good enough to
do the job:

$ hg log --verbose -r aff730947a3d
changeset:   1938:aff730947a3d
user:        Malte Helmert <helmert@informatik.uni-freiburg.de>
date:        Mon Aug 15 11:46:11 2011 +0200
files:       src/translate/no-invariants.patch
description:
Removed no-invariants.patch. To disable invariant synthesis,
set MAX_CANDIDATES to 0 in invariant_finder.py.

So the remaining bit to do is turn the translator constants into command-line
flags, which is issue264, so we can close this one.

From a UI perspective, I'm not sure "--invariant-timeout=0" or
"--max-invariant-candidates=0" is a good way to communicate the intention if one
really wants "--no-invariants", though. Maybe we should look at the option set
as a whole when we add translator options to decide what would make a coherent
collection.

Wouldn't it be easier and more general to make MAX_TIME for invariant generation 
configurable from the commandline?

Quote from Silvia:

The file "no-invariants.patch" is a patch that turns off invariant
generation in the translator (i.e., the resulting output will have exactly the
binary variables of the PDDL input). This has been helpful for some people in
tasks where the invariant generation was not working properly, so I've been
giving this patch to people as a work-around for their problems. It might be
worthwhile to keep this file... or put an option into the translator that skips
invariant generation.

=> We should implement that option, at least as a global flag in translate.py
like the others that are already there.