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 solution is to manage your namespace like it is common to do in other languages. You can selectively import dplyr functions:

select <- dplyr::select

For convenience you can also import the whole package and selectively reimport functions from previously attached packages:

library("dplyr")
filter <- stats::filter

R has a great module system and attaching whole namespaces is especially handy for interactive use. It does requires a bit of manual adjusting if the preferences of the package authors do not match yours.

Note that in packages and long-term maintenance scripts you should privilege selective imports, in part because it is hard to predict new exported functions in future releases. Having several packages imported in bulk might give rise to unexpected masking over time.

More generally a good rule is to rely on a single attached package and selectively import the rest. To this end the tidyverse package might be handy if you're a heavy tidyverse user because it provides a single import point for several packages.

Finally it seems from your question that you think that the order of attached packages might have side effects inside other packages. This is nothing to worry about because all packages have their own contexts. The import scheme will only affect your script.