Package: wnpp Severity: normal I am looking for a new maintainer for cronie, which I believe should become the new default cron daemon.
src:cronie is Fedora's fork of the original (and now unmaintained) ISC cron that has been extended with a number of features. Debian's own src:cron (which I co-maintain) is a fork of an even earlier version that has also been extended with its own number of features. My original goal, as (co-)maintainer of both, was to get at least feature parity into src:cron, but two things have become clear: 1. cronie should be the way forward. It contains many more features, some that have frequently been requested against src:cron, and more than we could reasonably duplicate (and even if: what would be the purpose). Copying code from src:cronie to src:cron is pointless. 2. I never managed to get cronie into unstable (in a way that switching from cron to cronie would break as little as possible), and I probably never will. My time was entirely consumed by cron, mostly be converting it to source format 3.0 (quilt), which was a pain given that the 1.0 patch had accumulated almost 30 years of changes. This took me a long, long time, but was necessary in order to make our cron codebase comparable/relatable to all the other cron forks out there. The cronie package itself is not in bad shape, I did occasionally bring it up to date. What a new maintainer would need to to is * First and foremost: ensure that switching between cron and cronie should work flawlessly. There's already code for that (with conffiles handed over, and so on), but I haven't tested that in a long time, and I'm sure it could be improved. * Better: go through the patch series of src:cron, and incorporate/ upstream anything applicable into cronie. The last time I checked, there were 5-6 patches for minor fixes not yet in cronie. * Best: Make cronie the new default cron in bullseye+1 (or bullseye, if one were to be super-ambitious). Our own src:cron, in which I have invested a great deal of my personal time (it was the first package I started contributing to), has reached a dead-end, I'm afraid. If you're interested, I can try to help with some of the points above, but I can't promise anything. Christian