Subclassing by monkey-patching

[Peter Otten]

Arnaud Delobelle wrote:

> Jason <jason.heeris at gmail.com> writes:
> [...]
>> Is there a way I can write the subclass but then somehow... extend an
>> existing instance all at once rather than monkeypatch methods on one
>> by one? So I could take an existing instance of a FileMonitor and make
>> it an instance of my subclass? This would even allow me to override
>> the gio.File.monitor_directory() method to take the monitor returned
>> by the original method and decide whether to make it recursive based
>> on a parameter passed to monitor_directory().
> 
> There is a straightforward way:
> 
>>>> class A(object):
> ...     def __init__(self, x):
> ...         self.x = x
> ...
>>>> class B(A):
> ...     def x2(self):
> ...         return self.x**2
> ...
>>>> a = A(42)       # Create an instance of A
>>>> a.__class__ = B # Change its class to B
>>>> a.x2()
> 1764
> 
> However, I've never really tried it so I don't know what ways it could
> break.

I think this is fine for classes written Python but won't work here:

>>> m = gio.File(".").monitor_directory()
>>> C = type(m)
>>> class CC(C):
...     def whatever(self):
...             print 42
...
>>> m.__class__ = CC
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: __class__ assignment: '__main__.GInotifyDirectoryMonitor' 
deallocator differs from 'CC'

A possible alternative may be a class that wraps a FileMonitor instead of 
subclassing it.

Peter