Comment 4 for bug 930471

Actually, the _WANT_ is to use the location provided through _Rsourcedir <first> and only if that location does not provide the needed sources attempt to fetch the sources. However we have practices in place that we do not rely on rpmbuild to actually fetch the sources. Actually, we even hack the source of rpm to specifically disable the automatic fetching of sources via rpmbuild.

However the output of rpmbuild of all referenced sources of a specfile with proper macro expansion is very useful to us.

The caching of sources happens based on a convention similar to the one used in debian, live example here: http://ftp.yoper-linux.org/pub/devel/source-cache/ .

File based macros are not appropriate, since these locations are really transient and used on the fly : http://powerplant.yoper-linux.org/projects/software-packages/repository/entry/rocketfuel/rrebuild/rrebuild.sh

From what I've seen so far we should be ready to upgrade to rpm-5.3, I have not yet read up of the implications of using 5.4. There's only the usual hesitation with respect to the noise and knock on effects when bumping the rpm5 version.