Michael Biebl wrote: > I'd agree here. user crontabs are such a niche case where systemd's > own facilities don't provide a direct replacement. > > That said, my main point was about packages shipping cron files. > > As a distro we'd benefit if those shipped native systemd timers > (instead or in addition). I don't think we have any packages in the > archive that make direct use of user crontabs? > > If all packages shipped native systemd timers I could envision that at > some point it would make sense to stop installing cron by default and > users that need or want user crontab can just run apt install cron.
Perhaps a first step would be to promote lintian's `missing-systemd-timer-for-cron-script` (https://lintian.debian.org/tags/missing-systemd-timer-for-cron-script) from "pedantic" to "warning"? If that were fixed for the majority of packages, `cron` could then become priority optional, with a release note suggesting to install it to support user crontabs.
