why do source rpms have "prep" dependencies?

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Sun, 9 Sep 2007, Andy Green wrote:

> Somebody in the thread at some point said:
>
> > no, i caught that.  but my point is that, if someone wants to
> > simply RTFS, is any of that extra post-patch processing going to
> > change the source?  if not, then it's utterly irrelevant to the
> > issue at hand,
>
> If not, it would be in %build... but to be fair to your point, it's
> unusual and probably bad news to have wild stuff in %prep.

yup, that was pretty much my point.

> > and there should be an easy way for someone to download a source
> > rpm, unload the tarball and apply the patches without going any
> > further and getting hassled by all the BuildRequires stuff.
>
> Sure.  Except that you can have multiple source tarballs and
> multiple patches for each in the SRPM, and the unpack action is
> totally regulated by the contents of %prep in the spec.  If %prep
> has funky stuff like wget in it for some reason, there is a valid
> what you could call "PrepRequires" there for wget that is handled by
> the BuildRequires.
>
> In short there is no "unload 'the' tarball" and "apply 'the'
> patches", there is just "execute %prep" -- which probably does
> something like that, but is open to do far more.
>
> Anyway if you want to patch it, there are two whole forks of RPM to
> offer it to: double your chances ;-)

or i could just whine and submit a bugzilla request:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=283901

yeah, that's easier.  :-)

rday
-- 
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Robert P. J. Day
Linux Consulting, Training and Annoying Kernel Pedantry
Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA

http://crashcourse.ca
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