Hello everybody. As of today, lsb-base is "less essential" than before, because util-linux no longer depends on it in stretch.
Also, if I'm not mistaken, lsb-base is a shell library to be used by init.d scripts, but those scripts are obsoleted by systemd. So, it is now possible (and in fact I do that) to have a chroot to build packages without lsb-base. When using a chroot like that, bugs like this one are discovered: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=839718 but of course we would discover them a lot faster if we had a lintian check for this (even if it's not 100% perfect). Thanks.