How to override stuff in a package at runtime?

Question

[EDIT: I'm running Python 2.7.3]

I'm a network engineer by trade, and I've been hacking on ncclient (the version on the website is old, and this was the version I've been working off of) to make it work with Brocade's implementation of NETCONF. There are some tweaks that I had to make in order to get it to work with our Brocade equipment, but I had to fork off the package and make tweaks to the source itself. This didn't feel "clean" to me so I decided I wanted to try to do it "the right way" and override a couple of things that exist in the package*; three things specifically:

1. A "static method" called build() which belongs to the HelloHandler class, which itself is a subclass of SessionListener
2. The "._id" attribute of the RPC class (the original implementation used uuid, and Brocade boxes didn't like this very much, so in my original tweaks I just changed this to a static value that never changed).
3. A small tweak to a util function that builds XML filter attributes

So far I have this code in a file brcd_ncclient.py:

#!/usr/bin/env python

# hack on XML element creation and create a subclass to override HelloHandler's
# build() method to format the XML in a way that the brocades actually like

from ncclient.xml_ import *
from ncclient.transport.session import HelloHandler
from ncclient.operations.rpc import RPC, RaiseMode
from ncclient.operations import util

# register brocade namespace and create functions to create proper xml for
# hello/capabilities exchange

BROCADE_1_0 = "http://brocade.com/ns/netconf/config/netiron-config/"
register_namespace('brcd', BROCADE_1_0)

brocade_new_ele = lambda tag, ns, attrs={}, **extra: ET.Element(qualify(tag, ns), attrs, **extra)

brocade_sub_ele = lambda parent, tag, ns, attrs={}, **extra: ET.SubElement(parent, qualify(tag, ns), attrs, **extra)

# subclass RPC to override self._id to change uuid-generated message-id's;
# Brocades seem to not be able to handle the really long id's
class BrcdRPC(RPC):
    def __init__(self, session, async=False, timeout=30, raise_mode=RaiseMode.NONE):
        self._id = "1"
        return super(BrcdRPC, self).self._id

class BrcdHelloHandler(HelloHandler):
    def __init__(self):
        return super(BrcdHelloHandler, self).__init__()

    @staticmethod
    def build(capabilities):
        hello = brocade_new_ele("hello", None, {'xmlns':"urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:netconf:base:1.0"})
        caps = brocade_sub_ele(hello, "capabilities", None)
        def fun(uri): brocade_sub_ele(caps, "capability", None).text = uri
        map(fun, capabilities)
        return to_xml(hello)
        #return super(BrcdHelloHandler, self).build() ???

# since there's no classes I'm assuming I can just override the function itself
# in ncclient.operations.util?
def build_filter(spec, capcheck=None):
    type = None
    if isinstance(spec, tuple):
        type, criteria = spec
        # brocades want the netconf prefix on subtree filter attribute
        rep = new_ele("filter", {'nc:type':type})
        if type == "xpath":
            rep.attrib["select"] = criteria
        elif type == "subtree":
            rep.append(to_ele(criteria))
        else:
            raise OperationError("Invalid filter type")
    else:
        rep = validated_element(spec, ("filter", qualify("filter")),
                                    attrs=("type",))
        # TODO set type var here, check if select attr present in case of xpath..
    if type == "xpath" and capcheck is not None:
        capcheck(":xpath")
    return rep

And then in my file netconftest.py I have:

#!/usr/bin/env python

from ncclient import manager
from brcd_ncclient import *

manager.logging.basicConfig(filename='ncclient.log', level=manager.logging.DEBUG)

# brocade server capabilities advertising as 1.1 compliant when they're really not
# this will stop ncclient from attempting 1.1 chunked netconf message transactions
manager.CAPABILITIES = ['urn:ietf:params:netconf:capability:writeable-running:1.0', 'urn:ietf:params:netconf:base:1.0']

# BROCADE_1_0 is the namespace defined for netiron configs in brcd_ncclient
# this maps to the 'brcd' prefix used in xml elements, ie subtree filter criteria
with manager.connect(host='hostname_or_ip', username='username', password='password') as m:
    # 'get' request with no filter - for brocades just shows 'show version' data
    c = m.get()
    print c
    # 'get-config' request with 'mpls-config' filter - if no filter is
    # supplied with 'get-config', brocade returns nothing
    netironcfg = brocade_new_ele('netiron-config', BROCADE_1_0)
    mplsconfig = brocade_sub_ele(netironcfg, 'mpls-config', BROCADE_1_0)
    filterstr = to_xml(netironcfg)
    c2 = m.get_config(source='running', filter=('subtree', filterstr))
    print c2
    # so far it only looks like the supported filters for 'get-config'
    # operations are: 'interface-config', 'vlan-config' and 'mpls-config'

Whenever I run my netconftest.py file, I get timeout errors because in the log file ncclient.log I can see that my subclass definitions (namely the one that changes the XML for hello exchange - the staticmethod build) are being ignored and the Brocade box doesn't know how to interpret the XML that the original ncclient HelloHandler.build() method is generating**. I can also see in the generated logfile that the other things I'm trying to override are also being ignored, like the message-id (static value of 1) as well as the XML filters.

So, I'm kind of at a loss here. I did find this blog post/module from my research, and it would appear to do exactly what I want, but I'd really like to be able to understand what I'm doing wrong via doing it by hand, rather than using a module that someone has already written as an excuse to not have to figure this out on my own.

*Can someone explain to me if this is "monkey patching" and is actually bad? I've seen in my research that monkey patching is not desirable, but this answer and this answer are confusing me quite a bit. To me, my desire to override these bits would prevent me from having to maintain an entire fork of my own ncclient.

**To give a little more context, this XML, which ncclient.transport.session.HelloHandler.build() generates by default, the Brocade box doesn't seem to like:

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
    <nc:hello xmlns:nc="urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:netconf:base:1.0">
        <nc:capabilities>
            <nc:capability>urn:ietf:params:netconf:base:1.0</nc:capability>   
            <nc:capability>urn:ietf:params:netconf:capability:writeable-running:1.0</nc:capability>   
        </nc:capabilities>
    </nc:hello>

The purpose of my overridden build() method is to turn the above XML into this (which the Brocade does like:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
    <hello xmlns="urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:netconf:base:1.0">
        <capabilities>
            <capability>urn:ietf:params:netconf:base:1.0</capability>
            <capability>urn:ietf:params:netconf:capability:writeable-running:1.0</capability>
        </capabilities>
    </hello>

Answer 1

So it turns out that the "meta info" should not have been so hastily removed, because again, it's difficult to find answers to what I'm after when I don't fully understand what I want to ask. What I really wanted to do was override stuff in a package at runtime.

Here's what I've changed brcd_ncclient.py to (comments removed for brevity):

#!/usr/bin/env python

from ncclient import manager
from ncclient.xml_ import *

brcd_new_ele = lambda tag, ns, attrs={}, **extra: ET.Element(qualify(tag, ns), attrs, **extra)
brcd_sub_ele = lambda parent, tag, ns, attrs={}, **extra: ET.SubElement(parent, qualify(tag, ns), attrs, **extra)

BROCADE_1_0 = "http://brocade.com/ns/netconf/config/netiron-config/"
register_namespace('brcd', BROCADE_1_0)

@staticmethod
def brcd_build(capabilities):
    hello = brcd_new_ele("hello", None, {'xmlns':"urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:netconf:base:1.0"})
    caps = brcd_sub_ele(hello, "capabilities", None)
    def fun(uri): brcd_sub_ele(caps, "capability", None).text = uri
    map(fun, capabilities)
    return to_xml(hello)

def brcd_build_filter(spec, capcheck=None):
    type = None
    if isinstance(spec, tuple):
        type, criteria = spec
        # brocades want the netconf prefix on subtree filter attribute
        rep = new_ele("filter", {'nc:type':type})
        if type == "xpath":
            rep.attrib["select"] = criteria
        elif type == "subtree":
            rep.append(to_ele(criteria))
        else:
            raise OperationError("Invalid filter type")
    else:
        rep = validated_element(spec, ("filter", qualify("filter")),
                                attrs=("type",))
    if type == "xpath" and capcheck is not None:
        capcheck(":xpath")
    return rep

manager.transport.session.HelloHandler.build = brcd_build
manager.operations.util.build_filter = brcd_build_filter

And then in netconftest.py:

#!/usr/bin/env python

from brcd_ncclient import *

manager.logging.basicConfig(filename='ncclient.log', level=manager.logging.DEBUG)

manager.CAPABILITIES = ['urn:ietf:params:netconf:capability:writeable-running:1.0', 'urn:ietf:params:netconf:base:1.0']

with manager.connect(host='host', username='user', password='password') as m:
    netironcfg = brcd_new_ele('netiron-config', BROCADE_1_0)
    mplsconfig = brcd_sub_ele(netironcfg, 'mpls-config', BROCADE_1_0)
    filterstr = to_xml(netironcfg)
    c2 = m.get_config(source='running', filter=('subtree', filterstr))
    print c2

This gets me almost to where I want to be. I still have to edit the original source code to change the message-id's from being generated with uuid1().urn because I haven't figured out or don't understand how to change an object's attributes before __init__ happens at runtime (chicken/egg problem?); here's the offending code in ncclient/operations/rpc.py:

class RPC(object):
    DEPENDS = []
    REPLY_CLS = RPCReply
    def __init__(self, session, async=False, timeout=30, raise_mode=RaiseMode.NONE):
        self._session = session
        try:
            for cap in self.DEPENDS:
                self._assert(cap)
        except AttributeError:
            pass
        self._async = async
        self._timeout = timeout
        self._raise_mode = raise_mode
        self._id = uuid1().urn # Keeps things simple instead of having a class attr with running ID that has to be locked

Credit goes to this recipe on ActiveState for finally cluing me in on what I really wanted to do. The code I had originally posted I don't think was technically incorrect - if what I wanted to do was fork off my own ncclient and make changes to it and/or maintain it, which wasn't what I wanted to do at all, at least not right now.

I'll edit my question title to better reflect what I had originally wanted - if other folks have better or cleaner ideas, I'm totally open.