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This is really astonishing. Are there no checks and balances in place for design decision in such a critical system component? What were the thoughts of all the major distros when they decided to go with systemd then?

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systemd was funded and implemented by the biggest commercial distro, Red Hat, first. Other distros were influenced by its decision (RH has always had a lot of influence on distro direction generally) and followed suit.

I’m not sure Red Hat ever had a lot of database design expertise internally and that probably explains the design and outcome. As I said earlier, the design was not subject to public scrutiny before it was implemented.

There is a certain consistency to IBM-dominated projects that suggests that there are checks and balances and that they are working as intended.

This design predates the IBM acquisition by seven years.

And Poettering worked at Microsoft until recently.

And the went on to make age checks mandatory on Linux, earning money in the process.

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