<p>I've got a few dozen Linux machines running <code>cron</code> and I'd like to put the crontabs in some sort of revision control system.  For source control I use Mercurial (<code>hg</code>), so that'd be ideal, but if there's some other system that is better suited to this task I'd consider it.</p>

<p>One aspect which is specific to my situation is that all the crontabs belong to a common user (not a real person, but a placeholder "services" login).  I'd like the revision history to include the actual author of each change, rather than the special account where the cron jobs actually run.</p>

http://joey.kitenet.net/code/etckeeper/
?
From that site:
etckeeper is a collection of tools to let /etc be stored in a git, mercurial, darcs, or bzr repository. It hooks into apt (and other package managers including yum and pacman-g2) to automatically commit changes made to /etc during package upgrades. It tracks file metadata that revison control systems do not normally support, but that is important for /etc, such as the permissions of
```
/etc/shadow
```
. It's quite modular and configurable, while also being simple to use if you understand the basics of working with revision control.