[continued from previous message]
And personally, I'd likely start by putting together a `dh-shelldeps`,
which parses shell the way that things like shellcheck does, does a
rough approximation of "what is every program invoked by every shell
script in the package", and looks that up in `shelldeps` metadata
analogous to `shlibdeps`.
Trying to officially support removing essential packages sounds to me
like a maintainance nightmare with little benefit, you have to do some explaining how you will keep this maintainable when you do it.
I expect it'll be maintained in much the same way most features in
Debian are maintained: the people who use it will submit patches, report
bugs when it doesn't work, and if they spend too much time reporting
those bugs or find it breaking more often than they'd like, they'll
implement more tooling (e.g. lintian checks, archive scans).
Right now, by way of example, if your package needs tzdata, and you fail
to depend on it, and because you have that package installed you don't
happen to notice, and you don't have autopkgtests that exercise that
part of the code, then there's very little to catch that. I don't think
this will be any worse than that, in practice, and we already deal with
that for e.g. `Priority: important` packages without substantial issues.
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