What exactly does the configure flag to enable systemd support do? It seems to me that building software to the systemd platform is just the same as building it for windows vs unix or any other platform. One can only hope it doesn't cause the others to wither away.
Why a database system should care about how processes get started is beyond me. Systemd is an entangled mess that every year subsumes more and more of the operating system, in a very non-cooperative way.
There are almost ten init systems. In every one of those init systems, one can run a process supervisor, such as runit or s6 or daemontools-encore, completely capable of starting the postgres server.
Every year, systemd further hinders interoperability, further erodes interchangeability of parts, and continues to address problems with WONTFIX. In the long run, you do your users no favor by including init-system specific code in Postgres or its makefiles. If systemd can't correctly start Postgres, I guarantee you that s6 or runit, running on top of systemd, can.
Postgres doesn't care which language makes a query to it. Why should Postgres care which init system started it? I hope you can free Postgres of init-specific code, and if for some reason you can't do that, at least don't recommend init-specific code.
OTOH since systemd is what's being supported by a significant number of distributions it makes sense to at least try to work robustly with it.
While my preference would have been to have made such a change at a major version transition, the reality is that database systems are competitive, and not keeping up with the underlying platform would have been very much to PostgreSQL's disadvantage,
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-- Mark Morgan Lloyd markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk
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