On a system that had apticron installed, I tried to install
apticron-systemd, after I accidentally discovered its existence.

After installing it, the "apticron" package remained behind as "rc";
purging it removes /etc/apticron, which would be apticron-systemd's
config now. So at minimum, these two packages don't cooperate well in
replacing one another.

Rather than fix that though, thinking about this a bit more broadly... I
wonder why the packages are split like that? There are lots of packages
in the archive that ship both a cronjob and a systemd timer -- the usual
pattern is to have the cronjob run this (or a variant thereof):
  test -e /run/systemd/system || ...
in order to skip the cron execution when running under systemd.

The Depends line could be switched to
  systemd-sysv | cron | cron-daemon

I think the above would do the right thing in all configurations,
including systemd configs that are now the default in Debian. Am I
missing something?

Thanks,
Faidon

Hi,

Thanks for reporting and sorry for the long delay. This is indeed an important
issue and I have fixed it in a quick way. I like your suggestion but I'll need
some time to make it work without breaking users installations.

I'll keep this bug open as wishlist.

Bests,