Add some way for starting-up controllers to disable non-controller networking until Tor is running.
This is the the successor ticket to legacy/trac#2355 (moved) , which proved on experience not to be the greatest idea (see legacy/trac#3354 (closed) and legacy/trac#3419 (moved) for more info).
The original goal as I understand it was to provide some way for a controller to launch Tor such that it won't make outgoing network connections until the controller has told it to, so that the controller has a chance to ask Tor whether it wants to use
One proposed options for doing this was a __DontUseTheNetwork option that would keep Tor from opening any non-controller listeners and from making any outgoing connections. See legacy/trac#2355 (moved) for more info on motivation here.
(There have been other proposals too, including an as-yet-unnamed, hard-to-specify option that would make should_delay_dir_fetches() return true. [The effect there would be to prevent any connections except those to fetch bridge descriptors, I think.])
The main prospective user for this option is T(A)ILS , so we should make sure that any proposed option would do what T(A)ILS needs before we run off and build it.
I'm opening this as an enhancement request against 0.2.3.x, since we're so late in the 0.2.2.x release process, but if whatever we do here turns out to be small enough and easy enough to backport, we should consider it a backport candidate for 0.2.3.x.