Hi. In the light of https://github.com/apache/netbeans/pull/2395 I'd like to share a story from early July. We were camping in no-signal land, but I still wanted to develop NetBeans. But it turned out to be impossible! There days we cannot build NetBeans without internet access. That's bad.
Of course, there are external libraries, but for that we have `ant download-all-extbins` - I can do it once with Internet connection, populate the local cache. At that time I know all the bits are on my local disk and I can disconnect and develop. At least it used to be this way in 8.2 times. It is no longer true... One problem is the continuous query for `-Dmetabuild.jsonurl`. The other are DTDs being downloaded all the time (`javaee.wildfly` is the one that always fails for me behind corporate proxy). I understand that modern software downloads 3rd party components all the time, but can we please return 20 years back and try to execute `ant download-all-extbins` and then disconnect and verify the rest of the build can actually run offline? It would be a great service to us, camping coders, who want to code without being online all the time. -jt
