Fork time? Maybe all the anti-systemd zealots were right all along…

Edit: To address whether it is likely that this change will affect users: Gnome is planning a stronger dependence on userdb, the part of systemd where this change is being implemented. https://blogs.gnome.org/adrianvovk/2025/06/10/gnome-systemd-dependencies/

Final Edit: The PR has been merged into main.

  • Oinks@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    10 hours ago

    The other user data is already stored in the userdb versions that nearly everyone who uses a systemd distro already has. You can check what data is being stored with userdbctl. On my system that looks like this:

    userdbctl user --output=json $(whoami)
    {
            "userName" : "sky",
            "uid" : 1000,
            "gid" : 100,
            "homeDirectory" : "/users/sky/home"
            "shell" : "/run/current-system/sw/bin/fish"
    }
    

    Honestly this PR is a bit of a nothingburger. I’m not aware of any distro really using userdb to store data beyond what you’d store in /etc/passwd (maybe Ubuntu does?). The main value of userdb seems to be as a frontend so other programs don’t need dedicated code to handle /etc/passwd, LDAP, etc. Notably GNOME recently eliminated their dedicated code in favor of just using userdb.

    And Userdb doesn’t really handle data validation at all. It enforces that you input a valid date after 1900, but that’s kinda it. I guess you need root/sudo privileges to change the birthdate but that’s not much of a hurdle for most Linux users.

    Really this entire PR boils down to:

    ALTER TABLE users ADD birthdate date;
    
    • jj4211@lemmy.world
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      7 hours ago

      And this is how I find out that systemd lets a process running as a user get the crypted password of the user:

      "privileged" : {
                      "hashedPassword" : [
                              "$6$AY98/.dwdtU20LBM$L9fFhaH.E2xA6waYBVmHl/wS4HFSPn5v/JaIlrSW6wLOfKkV6H1Boqggj/109WO/uHXF1J/NkyXsK1BaCRKwx/"
                      ]
              },
      

      I mean, why the hell…