Should `socketserver.BaseServer` have abstract methods?

[tungol]

Feature or enhancement

Proposal:

socketserver.BaseServer is documented to have the methods fileno, get_request, and server_bind, but it doesn't actually have these. They're implemented on the subclass TCPServer instead, and TCPServer is the only direct subclass of BaseServer in the standard library. Of the three methods, get_request is the only one called within any existing methods of BaseServer.

This seems like a situation where BaseServer is acting as an ABC with these methods expected to be implemented by any subclass. Abstract methods weren't available yet when socketserver was added. Does it make sense to use them now? I couldn't find anyone suggesting this on the issue tracker or on discuss.python.org, so I don't know if this has been considered and rejected before, or never really considered.

Has this already been discussed elsewhere?

This is a minor feature, which does not need previous discussion elsewhere

Links to previous discussion of this feature:

No response

Linked PRs

• gh-127209: Clarify and clean up the separation between BaseServer and TCPServer #127976

[picnixz]

I would be in favor of having protocols, traits, interfaces and political classes to inherit from abc or have a abc metaclass whenever possible. It makes the code more friendly from an OOP PoV although it could slightly alter performances compared to a plain "raise NotImplementedError" (how it would alter them is an open question).

So, having just a dummy method with a "raise NotImpelementedError" would be a good start. Having the decorator would be a plus but can be decided separately IMO.

cc @AlexWaygood @JelleZijlstra for typing and @gpshead for socket related code.