Issue importing classes from other plugins about volatility HOT 6 CLOSED

Ok, this is most likely caused because the ModuleRegistry will register any 
class present in a module once the module's been sourced.  This means that the 
line:

from volatility.plugins.filescan import FileScan, MutantScan,
DriverScan, PoolScanDriver

puts those classes directly into your module's namespace, causing them to be 
re-registered and causing the clash.

Could you please try the following instead:

import volatility.plugins.filescan as filescan

class DriverIRP(filescan.DriverScan):

and let us know whether that works?

Yep, that solves the problem - thanks. Another thing, which I can enter 
separately if you like (but I figure you might be aware of it) is that plugins 
in the contrib directory aren't registering. For example the 
contrib/plugins/verinfo.py doesn't show up for me using Rev 483. 

Ok, cool.  I think I might leave the bug open a little longer to discuss 
whether we should fix this, or whether we're happy telling people they can't 
use from...import lines.  Scudette, what's your take on this?

Also, would this go away if we changed the dynamic namespaces to path-based 
namespaces?  My guess is that it won't, in which case we still need to make 
this design decision.

Lastly, you're quite right, the contrib plugins won't register, that's by 
design.  If you want the (highly unsupported, since it's currently just my 
horrible verinfo) contrib plugins registered, you'll need to add them using 
either --plugins or setting it permanently in ~/.volatilityrc.

I dont expect the issue will go away if we change the import mechanism. This is 
a feature not a bug!

We could remove the restriction on registering the same module twice and that 
would make it go away.

No, I definitely don't want to remove that restriction.  We'd end up with 
duplicates, or worse, only let one of them win, and then we'd have to decide 
which one.  So it sounds like we're going to simply enforce that plugins 
authors cannot directly import into their plugins namespace.

I've updated the wiki page on Plugins, and am now marking this as WontFix.