For the record, I agree with this. I've run into the problem this solves a couple of times in my macro experiments.
Is there any reason we can't just do this? It's a trivial one-line tweak to the spec, though there's also a spec in the upstream repository and so I'm not entirely sure where this change would happen.
fedora-release should define %dist as %dist %{?distprefix}.fc# in /usr/lib/rpm/macros.d/macros.dist This way other macros could compute a dist prefix without clobbering dist itself An example of complex dist prefix is the one Fedora Packaging guidelines require for snapshots in: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Versioning#More_complex_versioning An snapshot automation macro is proposed in https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Forge-hosted_projects_packaging_automation Right now it has to redefine %{dist} in a non-reversible way