Re-Architecture from "Conveyor Belt" to "Singleton" about ntia-conformance-checker

[goneall]

@jspeed-meyers I like the proposed approach. I especially like your proposal of creating an SBOM object / class - but perhaps not as a singleton for reasons described below.

I'm thinking the SBOM class may allow the conformance checker to be used as a library by other applications that may want more control of the output (e.g. the SPDX online tools). If we wanted to expose the SBOM in a library, we may not want it to be a singleton so that multiple SBOMs could be used concurrently. That being said, I think most cases would only deal with one SBOM at a time.

For printing the results, would you create a function that accesses the SBOM and generates the output? I'm not very familiar with Python, but in Java it would also be convenient for the SBOM to have a toString() function that would display a summary of the information suitable for printing in debug situations.

[jspeed-meyers]

Ah, I see your point. I like it. Yes, I will make a class, but I will write in such a way that, as a library, there can be multiple SBOM objects.

For printing the results, would you create a function that accesses the SBOM and generates the output?

Yes!

I'm not very familiar with Python, but in Java it would also be convenient for the SBOM to have a toString() function that would display a summary of the information suitable for printing in debug situations.

Great idea. I will also write a toString() function that enables debugging.

Thank you for the feedback!!