I just went on a week-long vacation wherein I was programming, among other things, in locations with dodgy or nonexistent network connections. My offline Swift modifications worked great; so, local mirroring of packages is a total win!
But here’s a thing: a dinner conversation got me working in Flutter again. And, a few days before we left for this vacation, I got a note from JetBrains saying that they’re gonna adjust their subscription rates for, among other things, IntelliJ IDEA. Now, it’s been a few years since I did any Java development and I was starting to think maybe I would let my JetBrains subscription lapse. So I tried out Visual Studio Code with its Flutter plugins and rediscovered that Flutter really, REALLY, doesn’t like to be offline. So, okay, fair enough, I’m only even considering Flutter as a language for developing an app to be deployed to browsers, so the live operating environment requires a real Internet connection. Still, it’s kind of obnoxious.
Ooooh, and then, on the transcontinental flight home, I found that VS Code doesn’t like to attach to a Docker instance if there’s not an active connection to the Internet. Because, sure, I’ve got VS Code locally, and the instance is local, and in fact the container instance has had VS Code connected before, but I just restarted VS Code, and yet VS Code still wants to go off and download a debugger into the container. Just in case, you know, there’s been an update. And if it can’t, well, fuck you.
Which means that while I’m on this world cruise where the ship is in the middle of some ocean somewhere, God forbid I should need to reboot my computer.