On Wed, 13 Aug 2003, Derek Neighbors wrote:
> I believe that cron in Debian just recently got switched to run under cron
> instead of root.
>
> http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2003/debian-devel-200308/msg00160.html
Cron must runs as root if it is to change UID for running users' crontabs.
The change was for the crontab(1) user tool. It changed from being setuid
root to setgid "cron". In other words, the user's own crontab files are
now owned by group "cron".
(I may make that change to for my vixie-cron package.)
Jeremy C. Reed
http://bsd.reedmedia.net/