The list of files in rpms is one of the handiest services available from
rhn.redhat.com. I'll die and go to heaven if the dependency info's there
too.
The basic reason is that it makes it trivial to look up things without
logging into your PC, or if your PC is down, or if you're not running
that particular version of Fedora, etc.
You could search across the files of all packages, just for the price of
getting indexed by Google. It'd be nice if the complete file attributes
were there, including permissions, size and modification time. Imagine
if there were a checksum there, too: "Hm, my system might be 0wned. I
wonder what the authoritative metadata is for these files." Imagine if
you could compare how the list of files in an rpm changed during the
rpm's history...
At the risk of sounding like a a tard Barlow, this is a case of
"information wants to be free." You have no idea what kind of uses
people might have for this information. A web interface to it would be
really great. Otherwise, rpmdb turns into "the deep web."
