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

With respect to development inside an IDE the workspace from which we would like to resolve and retrieve dependencies is a read-only local repository to Mercury which is put at the front-end of the search order of any repository that Mercury will consult for artifacts.

h4. Generation of plugin metadata and packaging