why do source rpms have "prep" dependencies?

[Andy Green]

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.

> 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 ;-)

-Andy