Post #781572

2026-03-19 16:43 UTC

I think the issue outside of capitulation is the matter of systemd's obligation or lack thereof to make this change. Systemd by law isn't required to do anything. xdg-desktop-portal more so is, but that raises a bigger question: Why is a jurisdiction specific requirement being rolled into this? Do all jurisdiction specific requirements need to be loaded for optional use? Why is this being shunted to xdg-desktop-portal to handle the brunt of this? Ultimately the PR was closed and for this very reason: That amounts to a short-sighted decision to tune the specification to one state's law, without taking into account that other states and countries can define different age brackets, and without the ability for an application to know which age bracket classification (California, Japan if/when they mandate it, etc.) applies. Expanding on that, the outright shortsightedness of the request is made more clear further into that discussion: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/40974#issuecomment-4018655808 >Gender plays a role on whether you could use a computer and what sites you can access? In Afghanistan, all forms of higher education are not permitted for women. Furthermore, the Taliban have a reputation as gentlemen who are not used to repeating themselves.

Replies (1)

@FauxLiving@lemmy.world 2026-03-19 17:07

>I think the issue outside of capitulation is the matter of systemd’s obligation or lack thereof to make this change. Most of what systemd does isn't based on an obligation, it's based on creating a system that fulfills the needs of the users of the software. xdg-desktop-portal was adding age verification and the logical place to store that information is in the user's records. systemd is the project which xdg-desktop-portal looks to for storing user records and so systemd added a field to support xdg-desktop-portal's requirements. Like I've said elsewhere, I don't agree with the age verification laws... but they do exist. The software developers in the various projects are attempting to comply with them (or not, as in the OP) in their own ways. Nothing that systemd is doing here will affect you unless you want it to. The field is optional and not verified by systemd in any way (other than ensuring that it's an ISO 8601-compatible date). >Ultimately the PR was closed and for this very reason: The contention was that the field would only work for complying with a single state's law and the data wouldn't be useful to comply with other laws. For example, if a state defined an adult as 18 and another state defined an adult as 16 then simply storing 'Adult: [True|False]' would require individual fields for each legal jurisdiction. So it doesn't meet the specifications globally. To fix this, the PR that was merged stores a birthdate and leaves it to the application to determine how to use that information for compliance. Here's the merged PR: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954

Open ##2505482