I think there is a bigger issue with this change. It's currently not possible to download sources if the spec file cannot be parsed on a machine where fedpkg sources command runs.

Granted -- this is probably not an issue when it is maintainers/developers running the command on their laptops, but for example Fedora CI runs fedpkg sources when creating SRPMs from pull requests. And the CI machine is CentOS 8.

I opened https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/issue/9728 so we don't need to build SRPMs in CI "manually", but that ticket was blocked before Koji implemented certain missing functionality.

I am wondering if it would make sense to restore the previous behavior via some option, for example: fedpkg sources --force-download or something like that.

To be more specific, this is an example of a spec file for which Fedora CI fails to download sources: https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/rust-coreos-installer/blob/rawhide/f/rust-coreos-installer.spec#_18