Hi

On Wed, Oct 1, 2014 at 8:39 PM, Stephen Gallagher  wrote:
Unfortunately, that's a much harder task than it sounds (and also not
terribly useful). Just because we have a set of software that defines
the PLATFORM does not somehow make the other packages that you choose to
install less interesting. (Quite the opposite, really. The platform is
only interesting insofar as it allows you to run things atop it.)

Agreed on the question of platform but I do think it is quite useful to find out what lies outside the defined platform and I often do similar things for dealing with upgrades.  yum list extras to find out which packages are not associated with any repositories tells me what I need to pay special attention to before doing the upgrade for example. 

Fedora Workstation uses GNOME Software to gate packages to some extend (by filtering out some packages that don't meet a specific criteria) but it is unclear how Fedora Server will handle that.   I may not agree with all the criteria but it is atleast a workable mechanism to do what is needed here.

From a professional perspective,  I have recently been asked to take over administration of legacy systems and finding out what has been setup in a non standardized way is a key part of figuring out how to replicate it.  If some packages can have a different lifecycle from other packages, this is critically important and hooks within the upgrade tool to do some of the checks before the upgrade process is initiated would be highly useful.

Rahul