How can I prevent a library from masking functions

Question

A typical situation is the following:

library(dplyr)
library(xgboost)

When I import the library xgboost, the function slice<

Answer 1

The next version of R has this in the NEWS{.Rd} file (quoted from the NEWS file post-build):

• The import() namespace directive now accepts an argument except
  which names symbols to exclude from the imports. The except
  expression should evaluate to a character vector (after
  substituting symbols for strings). See Writing R Extensions.

There referenced text from the manual is here (in raw texi format).

So soon we can. Right now one cannot, and that is a huge pain in the aRse particular when functions from Base R packages are being masked: lag(), filter(), ...

We have used the term anti-social for this behaviour in the past. I don't think it is too strong.

To illustrate the problem, here is a snippet of code I wrote a decade ago (and had it posted on the now-vanished R Graph Gallery) which uses a clever and fast way to compute a moving average:

  ## create a (normalised, but that's just candy) weight vector
  weights <- rep(1/ndays, ndays)
  ## and apply it as a one-sided moving average calculations, see help(filter)
  bbmiddle <- as.vector(filter(dat$Close, weights,
                               method="convolution", side=1))

If you do library(dplyr) as you might in an interactive session, you're dead in the water as filter() is now something completely different. Not nice.