Implemented. See https://github.com/certtools/ieps/#list-of-ieps
I would like to lower the bar for adding additional bots by introducing mixins. Mixins are a concept coming from OOP theory and it is closely related to multiple inheritance. I think it could be a way to avoid a lot of duplicate code by outsourcing various functionalities to specific classes.
At the moment there are two types of bots that could make use of mixins.
The first are bots that make HTTP requests.
Currently we make that easier for bots by providing two methods,
create_request_session in intelmq/lib/utils.py and set_request_parameters
as part of the bot module (intelmq/lib/bot.py) itself. When the bot wants to
use a request session, it first uses set_request_parameters and then uses the
session object returned by create_request_session to make the request. I
think its a bit confusing to have methods that are related in two different
modules and I think the Bot class itself should not contain any code that is
not used by all the bots.
The second type of bots that could make use of mixins are bots that use a
cache. There are a lot of those that all use the intelmq.lib.cache module
which provides a Cache object to work with.
Using a Python class we could move everything related to HTTP requests to a class called HttpMixin. A bot that wants to use functionality from this Mixin just would have to inherit from this class, i.e.:
class MySuperBot(CollectorBot, HttpMixin):The MySuperBot class would then have all the relevant attributes to use session
objects and it would also have a private __session attribute to work with.
Another upside of this approach is, that it is possible to generate a list of
all the attributes a Bot has write access to (i.e. http_proxy, http_username,
ssl_client_cert...)
Similarly we could introduce a CacheMixin that allow access to private
__cache attribute. If MySuperBot does not only want to make HTTP requests,
but also have some caching mechanisms, it could simply inherit from both
classes:
class MySuperBot(CollectorBot, HttpMixin, CacheMixin):I propose to create a new module intelmq.lib.mixins that should be the home
for the mixins.
I have created a POC that implements the HttpMixin and uses it in the HTTPCollectorBot: https://github.com/certtools/intelmq/blob/develop/intelmq/lib/mixins/http.py
Mixins are also used in Django to add functionality to their class based Views, for more details see https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.1/topics/class-based-views/mixins/ A longer article about inheritance, MRO, mixins and Python that also talks about the implementation in Django can be found on https://www.thedigitalcatonline.com/blog/2020/03/27/mixin-classes-in-python/