Puppet

You would need to create a new provider for managing /etc/crontab. It might seem minimal, but managing cron jobs has turned out to be one of the most complicated types in Puppet.

I think I have to object to the statement above.
The only difference in /etc/crontab to the user's crontabs is that in the first case we have to specify the user under which a certain task is run.
Since puppet generates the crontab entry anyway, the change is not very huge. The user (which is given anyway) has to be added at the right position in the crontab line.

I do not think it is a good idea to start splitting up the cron provider into 2. This would introduce a lot mor complexity than is actually desired, I guess.

One issue remains, though: we do not want do delete or overwrite already existing crontab entries.
Why not user the "bracket editor" for this?

I still did not have the rime to look into this provider. I found a workaround, so maybe I simply do not understand the complexity of this provider.

Well, the file format is different, and you can't use the 'crontab' command to edit /etc/crontab, so the behaviour is pretty different. The formats are similar but not the same.

This ticket is both an enhancement request and a bug report that can be fixed pretty easily by enabling the root user, so in either case the ticket isn't appropriate. Feel free to open an enhancement request for /etc/crontab support.

This would require munging of the existing crontab provider, or a munged copy of it to support the different format for /etc/crontab. If someone is interested in getting this functionality, please supply code+tests. Thanks!