Offline Mode Design

* UPDATE: 18-April-2005

  We cannot take the approach outlined below of detecting which remote
  repositories are "really" offline, since offline mode is more of a behavior,
  and this will lead to counter-intuitive results. A different feature may exist
  unimplemented, which is to detect when the network is down and provide better
  feedback for that case. However, when offline mode is declared, nothing