I used to install minimal OS on server-side product environment, then install the ONLY needed packages for server programs, normally done by shell.
For convenient, the shell scripts is tar package, and transfer between windows client and linux server.
But when I install new Rocky system from Rocky-8.5-x86_64-minimal.iso, I just found the tar rpm package not pre-installed, I have to fetch the tar rpm package and install it first.
So inconvenience, I suggest pre-install tar rpm package in minimal Rocky install.
Thanks.
For querying the repo metadata:
dnf rq --groupmember tar lists the groups that include package ‘tar’.
dnf group info "Minimal Install" lists the groups that the minimal environment pulls in.
Have you looked at configuration management systems (like Ansible, Chef, Puppet, etc)?
In them you essentially give a list of packages to install and config customizations and
the tool does the “run scripts” in remote machine.
I do minimal installs and then run Ansible “play” on them to get “fully functional battlestation”.