+++ This bug was initially created as a clone of Bug #1472006 +++

Description of problem:
We have an rpmbuild server which NFS mounts a directory with build artifacts from a separate server farm. We had hoped to use spectool to automatically transfer Source#: files in .SPECS to our SOURCEDIR, which works fine for remote URLs but doesn't do anything useful with absolute paths. 


Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
rpmdevtools-8.10-2.fc26.noarch
Should be applicable back to >= rpmdevtools 8.0 (2011-02-06)

How reproducible:
Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Specify a SOURCE# using a file:// URL or absolute path in package.spec
2. spectool -v -g -S -R package.spec
3.

Actual results:
Couldn't fetch file:///mnt/foobar/build/package/1.0.0/package-1.0.0.tar.gz: missing URL

Expected results:
spectool copies the specified file into rpm's %{_sourcedir}


Additional info:
Recent versions of spectool in rpmdevtools use curl instead of wget and curl natively understands file:// URLs.

Suggest either supporting absolute paths directly, or just adding "file" to the allowed list of protocols:

> my @protocols = qw/ftp http https file/;

--- Additional comment from Ville Skyttä on 2017-07-18 08:47:25 UTC ---

I opted to remove the internal check for specific protocols altogether, everything that looks like it has a protocol is passed to curl now:

https://pagure.io/rpmdevtools/c/ecbe7300237b74abfbaa7c429b0e0b78468a89c6

--- Additional comment from Japheth Cleaver on 2018-08-27 23:31:41 UTC ---

Thank you. Is there any chance this patch could be backported into RHEL? file URLs are a useful feature for those wanting to automate this.

--- Additional comment from Neal Gompa on 2018-12-11 21:21:14 UTC ---

I can't do anything about RHEL rpmdevtools, a separate bug will need to be filed against the RHEL package.