There's a host of caching metadata we track in order to avoid doing work twice, as well as to decide how to do work given the already-available information. This intermixes the notion of existence (a la #7) with a degree of synchronization that's been performed, given existence.

Things are slapdash right now, but there needs to be a coherent system for recording this information that allows:

• Clear identification of what state the source manager is currently in
• Clear identification of what states the source manager is could (maybe) be moved to, in order to service a method call
• The caller to express (or not care) about the source of the information being retrieved

I doubt there's some design that'll really clearly enable doing this, so there may end up being more tight coupling than would generally be comfortable.