Last December, when I was in Australia and started to work on the Object_Freezer code, I "dived into" Bazaar (bzr) and learned the value of local commits as they allow me to work offline, e.g. when disconnected during travel. Thanks to bzr-svn, I can now work offline for PHPUnit development as well.

He shares his setup - a local shared repository for branching/trunk work and a linked checkout of PHPUnit between Bazaar and Subversion. This allows him to commit locally with Bazaar and, when he gets back online, issue a "merge" command to make the push back out to Subversion's remote repository.

There are several reasons that PHP could not be able to connect to MySQL. [...] Or, perhaps the entire server is offline.

The mysql.connect_timeout setting in the php.ini is supposed to handle this sort of instance, but the default is set tpo 60 seconds. It's only apparently used when the server is completely offline and, in his opinion, is set way too high. He's proposing a patch to the MySQL extension to change this setting's default to shorten it to something a bit more reasonable.