Dear Maintainer, /var/spool/cron/crontabs is already managed elsewhere, in cron-daemon-common.tmpfiles; and cronie Depends on cron-daemon-common so it should always be there. By the way cronie claims ownership of /var/spool/cron/crontabs, it will be removed by dpkg when switchin from cronie to another cron, which might have undesired effects. Hopefuly a reboot (which reruns tmpfiles) will fix it. Greetins Alexandre PS: same bug was filled against bcron too: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1139904