Re-think dbDriver("drivername")

[hadley]

This fails when a package is loaded but not attached (i.e. when the package is loaded with imports) because do.call can not find the function name in the global environment.

It might be better to have a convention where it also looks for packageName::packageName

[seth]

While I don't think we can remove it for back-compat reasons, I'm not all that clear of the value of dbDriver as a generic. The arguments needed to connect to a particular backend are at the crux of the "what is different". Each package already (I think) has a function like SQLite(). I wonder if we should move to have that be the way to get a driver.

[hadley]

Good point. It might be more useful to reframe dbDriver as a way of determining the driver from a connection or result.

Then we could gradually deprecate the character method and encourage people to call the package specific connect function directly.

[hadley]

Another idea would be to encourage package authors to create individual functions like sqliteConnect() that users would call - that would be a more natural place for the documentation to live.