Bug#316413: lintian: detect vanilla dependencies on Essential

[Dan Jacobson <jidanni@jidanni.org>]

Package: lintian
Severity: wishlist

I think I made a way to find all the violators of policy 3.5's clause:

  Packages are not required to declare any dependencies they have on
  other packages which are marked Essential (see below), and should not
  do so unless they depend on a particular version of that package.

Here's the script, which I hereby contribute to your checker programs:

essential=$(grep-available -n -s Package -F Essential yes|sort)
for package in $essential
  do
  echo ==== Packages depending on $package ====
# grep-available -s Package,Depends --eregex -F Depends "(, |^)$package($|,)"
# (or if we already are sure about our regexp, then just:)
  grep-available -n -s Package --eregex -F Depends "(, |^)$package($|,)"
done

Or maybe your checker programs already do this check.