I think of it as an architecture smell.

Especially since LAMP is not the universal web app target any more. We can and should architect from the OS up.

It's kludge plain and simple. It's ugly but it works (well kind of). That's the exact definition of a kludge. Further interesting things with wp-cron is that since other plugins make use of it, if you do have a "real" cron implementation the advice is to use the real cron to trigger wp-cron (via curl hitting a localhost only accessible page). Again, it's a kludge but it keeps things running.

On the topic of new stacks from the OS on up, Docker[1] (and lxc in general) and CoreOS[2] are really cool. It's a much more elegant and long term solution to packaged, yet controlled, environments.

[1]: http://www.docker.io/

[2]: http://coreos.com/

Ironically, you could wind up without any where to run your cron jobs in such a setup as well... (eg: running scheduled tasks in the container as the db/cache/webapp uid).

This is of course fixable, but still interesting given the context.

How? Crown is just a process that sleeps for a minute at a time, checks the config file, forks a process if needed and repeats plus some logging. The only reason WP does not implement that is because shared hosting will kill long running processes.

You would need extra configuration in order to run cron under the same docker container as your website?