Say I want to make it so that maven can work completely offline, just from someone checking out the project from source control. That means all dependencies must be under source control.

the only way to do this, as far as I know, is to rename your repository dir, run the go-offline goal, and then copy all contents of the repo into your project, add the repo location to you project pom and commit. The big problem with this of course is that maven has to go fetch everything from the net, and that its a pain to do more than once (i.e. when plugin versions change, as copy-dependencies already outputs to target/dependencies)

What would be much nicer, and easier to maintain, would be if there was a target option for go-offline. That way, i could set the 'target' to /mavenProjectRepo and everything needed to run maven on the project would be installed into that dir, from the local maven repo, or downloaded if required.

Hope I was clear, let me know if you want clarification.