A bit of history and a general roadmap for cruft development:
-------------------------------------------------------------

Cruft was written by Anthony Towns back in twentieth century. Mainly because of
lack of consensus on how to specify ignore patterns and how to integrate it
with dpkg, the development has stalled for several years. See the following
threads for more details:
 http://lists.debian.org/debian-policy/1998/04/msg00032.html
 http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2001/09/msg00647.html
 http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2004/02/msg01915.html

Since mid-2005, it is being cleaned up and enhanced by Marcin Owsiany, and is
in nearly usable shape (i.e. it does not report false-positives on a fresh
current sid base installation).

The long-term plan is to:
 - keep squashing bugs (some parts of the code are still messy and hard to
   understand and maintain)
 - keep acquiring filter and explain scripts for more packages, at least until
   cruft output is no longer erroneus on a typical desktop and server
   installation (the scripts/filters should still be maintained in cruft
   package).
 - when the previous step is reached, there should be enough material to decide
   on how exactly it should be implemented (I still think the current code is
   just a prototype)
 - when there is established policy on the filter and explain scripts, they
   should gradually be moved into their respectice packages, and be maintained
   there (as close to the code they describe as possible).
 - when the filter/explain files are widely adopted, they could be made Debian
   policy

Short-term TODO items:
----------------------

Policy:
 * There are three possible sources for file information: cruft package,
   another package, system administrator. Need to invent a policy which would
   allow seamless upgrades, so that old files do not override newly updated
   ones.

Checks:
 * add a check that symlinks and suchlike to excluded directories
   don't get whined about (/dev/kcore -> /proc/kcore)
 * handle .dpkg-{old,dist,new} files?
 * think over /tmp, /var/tmp, /usr/local, /home/ftp or similar directories
   whose contents depend on local policy

Code quality:
 * remove hard coded constants from .c files
 * fix possible overflow in readlinks
 * think up better names for this stuff?

Other features:
 * add a cronjob?

