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Which is nearly all of them, except perhaps C/C++, that I can think of, in terms of languages broadly adopted

You can cache and/or emulate the network to go offline but fundamentally a fresh build in most languages will want to hit a network at least by default

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In my world (VHDL/Verilog and some C/C++) there's a difference between the "fetch" and "build" steps. It's perfectly reasonable for the fetch step to require network access; the build step should not.

The real problem is that some language ecosystems conflate those two steps.

I'm mostly on board with that dichotomy except that I think it's also important that all fetched artifacts either come from a VCS or are similarly cryptographically versioned and all historical versions made available in a reliable manner.

Yes, absolutely - I can't disagree with that.

> at least by default

Even in C/C++ after changing the relevant parameters to non-default values things often break. It seems those configurations often go untested.

Google managed repos are a nice exception to this. Clearly documented commit hashes for all dependencies for a given release.

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