Description of problem: At least with AMD64, running genhdlist will create broken hdlist files, unless the "optional" --fileorder file is provided. I would say this is a bug. pkgorder isn't really option for genhdlist to work correctly Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): RHEL3 AMD64
It doesn't always require it. It depends on the package set and the architecture you're on in a lot of ways (ie, a basic i386 only run doesn't necessarily need it).
I've seen this break on an i686 system as well. genhdlist apparently generates a hdlist with packages listed in alphabetical order, which is how anaconda tries to install them. This fails, because dependencies don't get installed before the packages which depend on them, resulting in a lot of errors about missing libraries, users, files, etc. One of the most important packages, grub, fails to install the boot image in /boot because of these errors, so the server is unbootable.
I wonder, is there a reason that you wouldn't *want* to run pkgorder ? Why not make it a requirment?