Anacron vs. cron.

["R. Clayton" <rclayton@monmouth.edu>]

I've discovered that cron.daily isn't being run (the locate database is 8 days
old (I ran updatedb manually at one point), /usr/lib/man-cb/mandb hasn't been
updated since 15 August 2003, and so on).  The command for daily in
/etc/crontab is

  test -e /usr/sbin/anacron || run-parts --verbose /etc/cron.daily

which, to my eyes, checks for /usr/sbin/anacron and, if it exists (which it
does), does nothing; it's only when /usr/sbin/anacron doesn't exist that
/etc/cron.daily runs.  Because I can't figure out how anacron gets run (there's
no crontab entry I can find), this strikes me as wrong, but maybe I just don't
understand. 

Does anybody know what the story is here and, more importantly, how I can get
daily cron jobs back (as well as weekly and monthly jobs, because their
commands are of the same form)?  Of course, I could just uninstall anacron (or
rewrite crontab), but is that recommended?  If not, what is?