Oops, I posted this too early. It still needs more work, since I missed the next line hardlink as a dependency.
I may need guidance on whether I'm going down a rabbit hole and the export-image stage should really be considered dependent on stage2.
I know generally builds off of stage1 are not useful, and my concern is potentially adding risk to the 99.99% of builds to satisfy the 0.01%

For what it's worth. When using both commits to remove the dependencies on fake-hwclock and hardlink, I can successfully export an image based off stage1.
I'm fine with either decision to merge these in to support even more minimalist builds, or if it's decided to close this without merging due to the fact that the majority of builds will have fake-hwclock and hardlink installed.

Looks good, but maybe an if [ -x /usr/bin... ]; then type check is better to avoid unnecessary error being shown in the output?

Valid point. I made the changes. For checking hardlink I'm using hash instead of checking the absolute path, in case the user installs it to some other location.
I'm going to kick off a build to test this to ensure it works correctly, I haven't tested the change yet.

Thank you, much appreciated.

I ran a build that exported an image from stage2 and a separate build that exported an image from stage1 using this change. Everything is working as expected. The stage1 build skips the two commands and doesn't display error messages. The stage2 build successfully runs the two commands, since they're present.