I'm packaging up a shell script called tzwatch which displays the time from different timezones. It's actually a bash script since I thought it had some bashisms (while getopts case select), although reading through the info pages for bash, it seems these are standard sh commands after all. I marked it as a bash script by comparison with tzselect, on which the script is based, which is also #!/bin/bash.
Thinking it was truly a bash shell, I added a dependency on the bash package in debian/control: Depends: bash But doing this, lintian gives the warning: E: tzwatch: depends-on-essential-package-without-using-version bash I can't find much in Debian policy about this, so I'd like to ask, what does this error mean, and why is it an error? Is it correct that I do not in fact have to declare the dependency on bash, since it is an "Essential" package? Even if that's the case, why do I get this error? Lastly, is there a reliable way of confirming that I do not in fact have any bashisms, so that #!/bin/sh would be sufficient? sh is linked to bash, so simply writing #!/bin/sh in the script is not sufficient. Drew -- PGP public key available at http://dparsons.webjump.com/drewskey.txt Fingerprint: A110 EAE1 D7D2 8076 5FE0 EC0A B6CE 7041 6412 4E4A