This is a development cron daemon. It's intended as a debugging tool when developing anything cron based where it would be difficult to use normal cron or when cron runs must be modified for the dev environment.

For example, I have a django project that uses cron to run periodic tasks. The crontab is in the source tree so it can be managed and deployed with the code. While doing dev work, I need to run the cron tasks locally and modify the path of the commands. The crontab looks something like:

 # devcron delete_str /usr/local/bin/
 * * * * * /usr/local/bin/update-stats.py && \
           /usr/local/bin/publish-stats.py

That works normally on the production server and when I'm working, I run:

devcron.py my-crontab

and it will run update-stats.py in the working directory (my development tree) once a minute.

You can install with:

pip install devcron