Dear fcron maintainers,

I am getting the impression that the fcron package is de facto orphaned
and should be removed from the archive because:

 * The last maintainer upload has been in 2006[1].
 * The only reason that fcron isn't completely broken by now is that 
   several people have stepped in and fixed the most serious 
   issues[2][3][4].
 * There are a lot of really old bug reports; most of them have not 
   seen any activity in years[5]. The most recent comment from a 
   maintainer to a bug report seems to be from last march[6].
 * There are open security issues[7].
 * The current version in Debian (3.0.1) is severely outdated:
   Upstream has released 5 new stable versions in the mean time[8]
 * Although upstream is not dead, there hasn't been much activity in 
   the past years: Since late 2007 there have been only two small
   security and bugfix updates[8].
 * The popcon numbers are really low, AFAICT there are only 160 
   reported installations[9].
 * The combination of cron + anacron is a viable alternative.
 * Last but not least: There is a really annoying bug which causes 
   fcron to send useless mails to the administrator[10].

Please tell if you intend to fix these issues any time soon. If I don't
hear from you, I'm going to file a removal request in a few weeks.

Best regards

Alexander Kurtz

[1] http://packages.qa.debian.org/f/fcron/news/20061012T124703Z.html
[2] http://packages.qa.debian.org/f/fcron/news/20080330T113205Z.html
[3] http://packages.qa.debian.org/f/fcron/news/20080501T211706Z.html
[4] http://packages.qa.debian.org/f/fcron/news/20081029T111703Z.html
[5] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?src=fcron
[6] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=572587#10
[7] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=572587
[8] http://fcron.free.fr/news.php
[9] http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=fcron
[10] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=563273

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