Bug#974038: RFA: cronie -- Process Scheduling Deamon

[Christian Kastner <ckk@debian.org>]

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