How to override stuff in a package at runtime? [ Edited ]

[Sandeep Kommineni]

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: 

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. For More info Visit Tekslate

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 seems.