For what it's worth, some Fedora maintainers maintain that maintainers generally should use branches and not spec conditionals. Other maintainers ignore them.

For what it's worth, some Fedora maintainers maintain that maintainers generally should use branches and not spec conditionals. Other maintainers ignore them. That's a branch for every Fedora and EL release (assuming you maintain for EPEL) and pending releases; I'd rather not. I see nothing wrong with that conditional. It's a toss up which way you write such things, sometimes trying to second-guess future EL versions. I'd expect any Fedora derivative to define %fedora, the way RHEL derivatives define %rhel as well as, say, %centos. Good advice to the author. Apart from anything else, bug reports can be useful to fellow users, even if maintainers don't make the requested change -- or perhaps don't until enough ire from other users accumulates under the report.