man and man-db inconsitency between centos 6 and centos 7?

Question

I use "yum list installed" to determine if a package has been installed on centos. In particular, I was interested in the "man" program, installed with the command "yum install man".

In Centos6, if I look at the results, I see that "man" was installed. This is good.
In Centos7, if I look at the results, I see that "man-db" was installed. This is inconsistent.

The result is that the generic algorithm:

if I want package X , check the "yum list installed" output.
If X is not listed, install it, otherwise assume it's already installed.

Is there a reason for this inconsistency? The above algorithm works with most other packages.

Answer 1

what 'algorithm' ? there's no fixed correlation between program name and package name.

for example, the package providing 'iostat' and 'sar' is called sysstat.

And, some packages change their names in different major releases of an OS. Some packages are dropped entirely in new releases, and other packages are added.