operations.

  Offline mode really means anticipating a lack of network connectivity, and as
  a result turning off certain services provided by m2 and providing a coherent
  way of predicting and reporting when network-related failures will take place.
  It means warning users that since the network is missing, certain features and
  operations will be unavailable, rather than simply waiting for those

During the development of a plugin we would want to make it easy for a developer to create a plugin which means we would allow the direct use of a POM to state the dependencies of a given plugin and any tooling we created would be responsible for turning the dependency information in the POM into plugin metadata which described the dependencies of the plugin.