Often? No. Occasionally yes, although that tends to be on either a) ancient b) standalone boxes. Because of the static nature of rpmdb-redhat it grows more useless over time especially on distro like FC where packages get renamed during the release lifetime and updates are fast and furious. What I would miss probably is the formatting capabilities of rpm --qf which makes it useful from scripts for certain things.
I think all that functionality is housed in popt, but yah - I agree it is handy.
comps.rpm has the same problem of being a static entity and a rather strange beast at that. I wouldn't miss it a single day as long as the equivalent of comps.xml is somewhere around.. but the information is more important for systems without network connectivity (or if you just happen to *love* shuffling CD's back and forth to install stuff)
What are these "systems without network connectivity" that you speak of? :) Actually, there was also some discussion this evening of if the xml-metadata could store cd information in an additional attribute in the <location> tag. Specifically for things like system-config-packages and anaconda to be able to use the metadata with removable media.
Oh absolutely, if the command line tool can grok rpm's --queryformat syntax or equivalent alternative (but compatibility with rpm would be quite important I think so rpm --qf junkies like me don't have to relearn a new query "language" :)
you know... if you're interested, it would be a fun time to learn the repomd module for accessing the metadata. :)
-sv