anticipate the inevitable network failures that accompany being physically
  disconnected from the network, and adjust it's behavior accordingly.

  It is more than simply understanding that m2 cannot go and check for the
  latest version of some snapshot artifact. If m2 is offline, SCM operations
  cannot succeed; no artifact downloads can take place, regardless of whether

the pre-digested format that Mercury could utilize to resolve and retrieve dependencies. We need to be careful that we are using Mercury during development and production so that we don’t get in the situation where Maven 2.x is resolving differently than Mercury is. We can still leverage POMs during development but we need to make sure Mercury is doing the work.

With respect to development inside an IDE the workspace from which we would like to resolve and retrieve dependencies is a read-only...