rlaager
commented
11 years ago awk is an "Essential" package. I missed this because none of the awk implementations have Essential set. (I did check, several months ago, for non-ZFS packaging work I was doing.)
Because you can only set "Essential: yes" on real packages and awk is a virtual package (as there are multiple implementations), this is accomplished by having base-files: Depends: awk.
Accordingly, it's not necessary to declare this dependency.
If awk is not installed, zfsutils causes "zfs" in bash to throw errors (if bash-completion is installed, which is the default on Ubuntu).