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

1. It is possible to prevent some functions from being masked?

I don't believe so but I could be wrong. I'm not sure what this would look like

2. Is it possible to mask "the masking function" (e.g. xgboost::slice) with an early imported function (e.g. dplyr::slice)?

If you're asking about just or use in an interactive session you can always just define slice to be the function you actually want to use like so

slice <- dplyr::slice

and then you can use slice as if it is the dplyr version (because now it is).