Description of problem: To quote myself from the recent ml discussion: Well you assume that buildep is only used to build packages. But if you want to build the upstream source of a package for any reason having a command that installs required packages is handy. For instance if I want to build "foo" to write / test a patch I do "yum-builddep foo" "jhbuild buildone foo" ... I have the code, can hack on it, can build it without messing with deps and do not have to build a package (development does not always mean "packing"). i.e it should work like yum where having a srpm / spec file is not required.
I too think this is an oversight -- I used yum-builddep all the time to install the build dependencies for an upstream package that I'll be building from source (and not from a spec file). I agree that the builddep plugin for DNF should *not* require an SRPM or spec file.
See https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=905697#c19 onwards, its not an oversight.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 1074585 ***