[Rd] quiet namespace load is noisy

[Lionel Henry]

Hello,

I think `quietly` should only silence normal masking messages
intended for users and providing information about normal
behaviour, such as masking.  This is not the case here as the
message is about overriding of S3 methods, which has global
effect and is rather problematic. It may change behaviour of
package and script code in unpredictable ways.

This is not something that the user can act upon, the developers
of the parties involved need to be contacted by users so they can
fix it (the developers of the conflicting methods might not be
aware if the generic is from a third party package, such as
base::print()). In the case of ggplot2 vs rlang, you can update
ggplot2 to the latest version to fix these messages.

> After all, other package startup messages ARE suppressed, and
> even error messages are suppressed

Note that `quietly = TRUE` does not really suppress error
messages for missing packages. The errors are converted to a
boolean return value, and thus become normal behaviour, for which
it makes sense to suppress the message. This does not imply the
S3 overriding message should be suppressed as well.

Best,
Lionel


> On 23 Jul 2019, at 06:29, Lenth, Russell V <russell-lenth using uiowa.edu> wrote:
> 
> Dear R-devel,
> 
> Consider the following clip (in R version 3.6.0, Windows):
> 
>> requireNamespace("ggplot2", quietly = TRUE)
>    Registered S3 methods overwritten by 'ggplot2':
>      method         from 
>      [.quosures     rlang
>      c.quosures     rlang
>      print.quosures rlang
> 
> It seems to me that if one specifies 'quietly = TRUE', then messages about S3 method overrides should be quieted along with everything else. After all, other package startup messages ARE suppressed, and even error messages are suppressed:
> 
>> requireNamespace("xyz", quietly = TRUE)
>> ## (it is silent even though there is no "xyz" package)
> 
> Thanks
> 
> Russ Lenth
> U of Iowa
> 
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