I just did a custom install of RedHat 5.2 and managed to skip the tcp_wrappers package (contains /usr/sbin/tcpd). I did install all the other networking stuff, which one would think would require tcp_wrappers. So, I suppose the bug is that other networking packages should require tcp_wrappers (one shouldn't be able to not install tcp_wrappers since almost all the networking stuff run by inetd needs tcpd). I only discovered it by trying to rsh to the box, failing, and then looking in the logs to find I had no /usr/sbin/tcpd.
this is fixed in a later release of netkit-base (the package that contains inetd.)