mx linux and R: systemd error

[paulb]

mx linux does not use systemd by default: Systemd – MX Linux

re systemd: "It is more integrated than prior init systems, and can better do parallel operations during startup. Its service manager and dbus implementation are integrated in the init system, so they all run under PID1 (the first program ID)"

when i run comman library(tidyverse) i see this message:

yet things seem to work fine (although i have been playing with R only for a day or so). I assume then i can ignore the message. Anyone else run into this? Others have asked but no one responded: R package tidyverse in MX Linux 19.4 - Stack Overflow

thanks

[mara]

Does this only happen with tidyverse, or do you have the same problem with other packages?
What about when you use the plain R GUI vs in RStudio?

I'm not sure how much help I can be, since I don't know much about mx linux, but including some details of your OS version, and the versions of the applications you're using might help someone else troubleshoot, too!

[AlexisW]

Interestingly there is this line in a gitpod configuration file:

      ## Work around glitch with non-systemd systems
      ln -s $(which true) ~/bin/timedatectl

So looks like Kirill Müller is aware of a similar problem, a a workaround is to create this symlink, so that calling timedatectl will just return no error.

The ultimate cause seems to come from this part of R base, in the code of Sys.timezone():

## First try timedatectl: should work on any modern Linux
    ## as part of systemd (and probably nowhere else)
    ## https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/sd_booted.html
    if (dir.exists("/run/systemd/system") && nzchar(Sys.which("timedatectl"))) {
        inf <- system("timedatectl", intern = TRUE)
        ...

So maybe the suggestion in this similar bug report for lubridate of setting TZ=<your/timezone> as an environment variable would work, so that Sys.timezone() does not need to be called.

[paulb]

thanks for your reply. I installed ggplot2 and ran library(ggplot2) just to see what happens, it didn't show the error, so maybe it is specific to tidyverse. I could boot mx linux with systemd and I'm sure the issue would be resolved, but i'd rather avoid this if possible. I'll also avoid RStudio, i prefer to work on the command line. I just wonder why tidyverse would be concerned with systemd ...