determining what RPMs are in an install

Mon, 6 May 2002 15:53:22 -0400

Does anyone know how to determine exactly what RPMs
are bundled together for a given Red Hat standard
installation, i.e., for a Workstation and for a Server,
without having to actually install a system and then
look to see what you've got?

I've been working on documenting the use of certain
utilities that I later came to find out are not part
of the Workstation install, but must be specially
loaded. This is normally not a big deal, except that
the material I'm working on is going to be used by
instructors in classes all over the world, and it would
be wise in the future to make sure that the functionality
I'm writing about will be included on the typical
classroom installation.

The case in point is the mtools RPM. The GNOME gfloppy
program allows easy formatting of floppies, and putting
either an ext2 or DOS file system on it. I have most
everything there is available to load on my system,
and assumed that since gfloppy is there, a part of
GNOME, that mtools would also be there to support it.
It's not, as someone testing my stuff found out.

The workaround is to add a note in the textbook that
such-and-such a package may need to be installed
specially, but it's better to avoid that sort of
thing.