It is currenty planned to bring the cronie package up to date, porting over the Debian changes to cron to cronie, making cronie a drop-in replacement for cron.
It is now evident that Debian's Vixie cron-3.0 has reached its end-of-life. The codebase has diverged too much from other distributions, which mostly base their own versions (each effectively forks of their own) on ISC cron 4.1. It has therefore become increasingly difficult to share code between these codebases, both for features and for fixes.
The most reasonable scenario is a switch to Fedora's cronie, as it is the ISC fork that has seen the most further development. To this end, all of the fixes in Debian's cron should be upstreamed in cronie, and as many of the features as reasonably possible. The latter might not be as difficult a task as it might sound, as many features have already been shared between these two codebases.
Furthermore, to improve interoperability to the other alternative cron implementations listed above, the system crontab files as well as the common code used to set up user crontabs in `/var/spool/cron/crontabs` should be factored out into a separate package `cron-common`. Keeping them in `src:cron` requires all kinds of trickery in both cron and the alternative implementations just to allow a smooth switch between these packages.
## TODO
* factor out the crontabs into a dedicated package that other cron drop-ins can depend on
* convert cron to 3.0 (quilt) format to make it easier to track Debian extensions
* bring cronie package up to date
* add Debian extensions to cronie
* create mailing list for collaboration
1. Upload src:cron in format 3.0 (quilt)
1. Create a new package `src:cron-common` containing the system crontabs and user crontab setup
1. Coordinate a transition to this `src:cron-common` amongst all cron implementations in the archive
1. Upstream all fixes, and as many features as possible from `src:cron` to `src:cronie`
1. Switch the default cron from `src:cron` to `src:cronie` in time for bullseye.
