One depending on the other seems like the worst of both worlds: more code to compile for everyone.

Personally I still prefer chrono's API; chrono is also much more conservative about the MSRV (currently at 1.38) whereas time consistently bumps to N - 3, which seems like a meaningful difference.

time depends on the libc timezone parsing with some fairly involved workarounds to avoid hitting undefined behavior, while we incorporated time zone parsing in Rust with some caching for chrono.

So I think these are meaningful differences -- feels unlikely that these projects will merge.