On Sun, Dec 23, 2007, Ralf S. Engelschall wrote:

> [...]
> Additionally, what would be IMHO a lot more useful in practice than
> additional _tracking_ functionality would be to have the companion
> feature which is still missing in RPM: the possibility to automatically
> download those distribution files which are still not present on the
> local filesystem!
> [...]

I'm not sure whether it is clear to all why this feature
is IMHO important for RPM. Well, it is important as it
would fill the gap between tracking and building.
The usual packaging update procedure is:

1. check for latest vendor version:
   $ rpm -bt foo.spec
   Checking for foo... new version 1.2.3 found

2. adjust the package specification for the new version:
   $ vi *.spec
   > Version: 1.2.3

3. fetch the (now still missing again) distribution file(s):
   $ rpm -bf foo.spec
   (in OpenPKG the "-bf" actually was "--fetch" until the functionality
   was moved to a separate command, but "-bf" for the "fetch step during
   build" sounds better IMHO).

4. build the package:
   $ rpm -ba foo.spec

As you can see in this usual procedure, steps 1/2/4 are now provided by
RPM out-of-the-box, but the intermediate step 3 is still not supported
by RPM itself. But is should be supported directly by RPM (and not an
external auxilliary tool) because RPM knows how to correctly parse
foo.spec for the SourceX and PatchX tags, knows how to store the files
(%{_sourcedir}), etc.

With the functionality of step 3 available, RPM finally could support a
more complete packaging life-cycle -- which IMHO is very important.

                                       Ralf S. Engelschall
                                       rse@engelschall.com
                                       www.engelschall.com