For people who simply want to "read the fine source," it would be nice if
"rpmbuild" supported an option to do nothing more than untar the source and
apply the patches for a given spec file.

As it stands, the currently minimal "prep" step ("-bp") insists on processing
all the "BuildRequires" values and complaining about missing source rpms that
would be necessary for a *build*.  But if you just want to look at the source,
none of that should be relevant.

What about a new rpmbuild option such as "-bu", representing a simple "untar and
patch", so people who are told to go read the source can do exactly that without
having to deal with the grief inflicted by irrelevant BuildRequires dependencies?