[R-pkg-devel] duplicate function during build

[ProfJCNash]

In trying to rationalize some files in a package I'm working on, I
copied a function from one file to another, but forgot to change the
name of one of them. It turns out the name of the file containing the
"old" function was later in collation sequence than the one I was
planning to be the "new" one. To debug some issues, I put some print()
and cat() statements in the "new" file, but after building the package,
they weren't there. Turns out the "old" function got installed, as might
be expected if files processed in order. Debugging this took about 2
hours of slightly weird effort with 2 machines and 3 OS distributions
before I realized the problem. It's fairly obvious that I should expect
issues in this case, but not so clear how to detect the source of the
problem.

Question: Has anyone created a script to catch such duplicate functions
from different files during build? I think a warning message that there
are duplicate functions could save some time and effort. Maybe it's
already there, but I saw no obvious message. In this case, I'm only
working in R.

I've found build.R in the R tarball, which is where I suspect such a
check should go, and I'm willing to prepare a patch when I figure out
how this should be done. However, it seems worth asking if anyone has
needed to do this before. I've already done some searching, but the
results seem to pick up quite different posts than I need.

Cheers, JN