activation, it might be nice to allow a user to activate/deactivate a plugin instead of having to uninstall and reinstall a plugin in particular cases. This would prevent having to reconfigure the plugin again. For example it might be nice to turn off LDAP authentication without having to uninstall the plugin.

These particular phases in a plugin’s lifecycle can probably be generalized to all plugins so could be something implemented in all plugins. Here we could have the descriptor either...

  the system can't tell whether it has access to the network required by these
  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