Oh it definitely does.
I am handling mass rebuilds of Ruby packages or updates of Ruby on
Rails. This is complex task requiring touching plenty of packages. Due
to update of Rails in master, I simply cannot contact maintainers of all
packages and assuring their branches still works. I cannot test the
.spec files on Rawhide and EPEL just because there is chance somebody is
going to build the packages on EPEL. At the and, you cannot even trust
the EPEL macros in Fedora.
And of course every branch specific branches makes this mass changes
more complicated, because you simply cannot script it.
If there were no branch macros and we could consider just Rawhide doing
such changes, the .spec files in Fedora would be generally i better shape.
Vít
Maybe a decent compromise would be to make maintainers of such packages responsible to fix
any incompatibilities introduced by such changes.