Here is an excerpt from /etc/crontab on a RedHat system:

01 * * * * root run-parts /etc/cron.hourly
02 4 * * * root run-parts /etc/cron.daily
22 4 * * 0 root run-parts /etc/cron.weekly
42 4 1 * * root run-parts /etc/cron.monthly

As you can see, these jobs will run at a fixed time of hour / day / week / month.

By contrast, the run-crons on SUSE potentially runs jobs every hour, and they actually run whenever there is a certain elapsed time since the job was last run.  Although this may be useful in certain circumstances (e.g. a machine which has a lot of down-time), I find it unhelpful when some of the cron.daily jobs run during office hours, particularly updatedb which does a disk-intensive "find".  It would be much better in this case to schedule these to happen at fixed times, in particular so that cron.daily scripts run during the night.  So personally I have copied the run-parts script and /etc/crontab entries from the RedHat system, and commented out run-crons from /etc/crontab.

I am not suggesting that you force this behaviour for everybody, but at least make it a configurable option please.

Many thanks.