R devel - Oct 2013 - No warning for conflicting methods?

It would be really nice if R warned you when packages had conflicting
methods. For example (and this took me a couple of hours to track
down), RMySQL and RPostgreSQL both define setMethod("print",
"dbObjectId"), so that:

library(RMySQL)
getMethod("print", "dbObjectId")

library(RPostgreSQL)
getMethod("print", "dbObjectId")

Obviously it's a bad idea to associate methods with classes that you
don't own, but it would be great if R could give some warning in this
situation.

Hadley

-- 
Chief Scientist, RStudio
http://had.co.nz/

As Duncan pointed to me off-list, I may have mis-diagnosed this
problem because both RMySQL and RPostgreSQL define their own
(identically named) dbObjectId classes.  So this may be a more subtle
S4 dispatch bug.

Hadley

On Wed, Oct 9, 2013 at 3:21 PM, Hadley Wickham <h.wickham at gmail.com>
wrote:
> It would be really nice if R warned you when packages had conflicting
> methods. For example (and this took me a couple of hours to track
> down), RMySQL and RPostgreSQL both define setMethod("print",
> "dbObjectId"), so that:
>
> library(RMySQL)
> getMethod("print", "dbObjectId")
>
> library(RPostgreSQL)
> getMethod("print", "dbObjectId")
>
> Obviously it's a bad idea to associate methods with classes that you
> don't own, but it would be great if R could give some warning in this
> situation.
>
> Hadley
>
> --
> Chief Scientist, RStudio
> http://had.co.nz/


-- 
Chief Scientist, RStudio
http://had.co.nz/