[Rpm-maint] [rpm-software-management/rpm] RFE: more finegrained BuildRequires (Issue #2631)

[Panu Matilainen]

BuildRequires as they are in current rpm are a large and imprecise hammer: they describe the dependencies needed to build the package. That is, to execute the build scriptlets. But reality is far more subtle than that: there often are dependencies that are required to even successfully parse the spec, which is required just for producing an src.rpm (ie, `rpmbuild -bs`) without building anything at all. A common request is separating dependencies only used for testing, which are not always relevant and it'd be handy to automatically exclude them when --nocheck is used. Another isolated step is the %prep stage - developers commonly want to look at the sources, patches applied and all, without having any intention of actually building the software. Rpm currently ignores buildrequires for -bp but just like with parse dependencies, that's just looking the other way and hoping for the best.

A naive approach would just add BuildRequires(prep) and so on for all relevant sections, but I don't think separating %conf, %build and %install makes sense, we want a little bit higher level of abstraction here. It seems there are four distinct levels of dependencies
- spec parsing
- source preparation (%prep)
- building (%conf, %generate_depends, %build, %install)
- testing (%check)



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