Comment 4 for bug 794082

The unfortunate reality is that /etc/default/* has been deprecated due to concerns over boot speed. Basically, randomly pausing to read and parse these files has a large net-effect of slowing the boot, whereas parsing /etc/init/*.conf once at the boot's startup is extremely fast.

If you are using these files, you should just edit /etc/init/cron.conf yourself, or /etc/init/cron.override if you do not want package upgrades to show diffs if we change the file.

so if your /etc/default/cron has

EXTRA_OPTS='-L 4'

That becomes

exec cron -L 4

In /etc/init/cron.override

I will remove the file from the package, however, so its clear that this file does nothing.