Description of problem: My understanding is that the rpmdb-redhat database should only contain information on packages that are included with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3. Unfortunately, it seems to include packages we did not ship. For example, it includes lynx-2.8.5-11. A dump of the database with rpm -qa --define '_dbpath /usr/lib/rpmdb/%{_arch}-%{_vendor}-%{_os}/redhat' lists 1209 packages. RHN claims 1096 packages for AS in the channel. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): rpmdb-redhat-3-0.20031007
That's an incorrect assumption. It includes information on all packages which are included in the unfiltered-unified tree. The reason for this isn't technical, but more of a turnaround-time-from-start-to-finish of the composes. Creating an rpmdb package for only the packages we ship in each variant would increase the compose time considerably.
The main reason this came up was because a customer was trying to use rpm -q --redhatprovides /usr/bin/lynx to find which package lynx was now in, and was surprised when he couldn't find the lynx package which "Red Hat provides" in RHEL AS (which implies that it isn't in any other x86 arch version of RHEL 3 either).
Yeah. This is something that we'll have to change for Taroon++. What I'm considering doing is building one per variant. It will take some work to do, but it's definitely not impossible. As for RHEL 3, it's probably not going to change.