Description of problem: yumdownloader can't download SRPMs from FC and FE. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): yum-utils-0.2-2.fc4 How reproducible: "yumdownloader straw" grabs the FC4 rpm. "yumdownloader --source straw" fails with No Match for argument straw Ignacio said in #fedora that this needs the SRPMs in the repo to work.
straw's srpm isn't in the default Fedora Extras repository - it is in a separate srpm repo for Fedora Extras. so yumdownloader is doing exactly the right thing - the straw srpm doesn't exist.
It may not be a bug per se, but I wouldn't describe this behavior as the right thing to do, or even the expected. I would have expected it to download SRPMS without issue. I haven't seen any SRPM repos. Considering yumdownloader doesn't have an enablerepo option, a SRPM repo would slow down every other transaction for what isn't likely to be a common operation. For anyone else who comes looking, a SRPM repo just needs $basearch replaced with SRPM and the repo name in brackets changed. Or one can use --urls and substitute SRPMS and src for the directory and package architechture values.
right - but it's not really a yum bug - it's more of a repository configuration issue. I'll file this under distro