[issue30691] WeakSet is not pickleable

[Raymond Hettinger]

Raymond Hettinger added the comment:

> If you pickle also hard refereces to the items,
>  a WeakSet can be pickled and unpickled as expected (after 
> fixing __reduce__).

That seems contrary to the original intent of a WeakSet.  I recommend not going 
down the path of adding pickle support.

If copying is also broken, then it is reasonable to either fix it or remove it 
depending on whether a fix is straight-forward.

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[issue30691] WeakSet is not pickleable

[Serhiy Storchaka]

Serhiy Storchaka added the comment:

The method is broken (and always was). Pickling doesn't work because the state 
contains unpickleable object. Copying works incorrectly, since the pickle state 
contains references to the original WeakSet and it overrides the __dict__ of 
the copy, making its state inconsistent. If the purpose of implementing the 
__reduce__ method was the support of the copying, the __reduce__ method should 
be fixed or the copying should be implemented with implementing the __copy__ 
and __deepcopy__ methods.

However there is a subtle moment with pickling WeakSet (as well as with 
pickling weakref.proxy, see issue18068). The problem is that if you pickled a 
WeakSet, but not hard references to its items, the items will be disappeared 
just after unpickling, since they have no hard references. This may confuse. If 
you pickle also hard refereces to the items, a WeakSet can be pickled and 
unpickled as expected (after fixing __reduce__).

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[issue30691] WeakSet is not pickleable

[Raymond Hettinger]

Raymond Hettinger added the comment:

> I wondering whether WeakSet should be made pickleable or 
> the __reduce__ method should be removed.

When considering whether to remove a method from long published code, if the 
method isn't broken, our guidance should come from whether user's have actually 
taken advantage of __reduce__.   Determining that answer involves searching 
published code (Google's code search used to be a good tool for this, now we've 
got Github's code search tools).  

In general, the burden is high for removing an existing feature (even if 
untested); otherwise, we risk breaking people's code for no good reason other 
than the joy that comes with churning code to solve an invented problem (one 
that has never arisen in real code and has never been reported by an actual 
user).

When considering whether to add pickle support, the bar is much lower.  Roughly 
the question is amounts to balancing the potential benefits (whether someone 
might need to pickle a weakset someday even though we have no evidence that 
anyone has ever wanted this) versus the costs (risk of introducing bugs, 
creating cross-version incompatabilities, increasing future maintenance costs, 
increasing the total code volume, etc).

If adding pickling capability is easy and clean, then it seems reasonable.   On 
the other hand, if it is even slightly tricky, we should skip adding a feature 
that no one has ever asked for.  The 
weak reference containers have long been a source of bugs, some of which were 
challenging to fix.

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[issue30691] WeakSet is not pickleable

[Serhiy Storchaka]

New submission from Serhiy Storchaka:

WeakSet contains the __reduce__ method, but it isn't pickleable (and never 
was), because the pickle state contains the value of the __dict__ dict 
attribute which contains a reference to unpickleable local function _remove().

>>> pickle.dumps(weakref.WeakSet())
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "", line 1, in 
AttributeError: Can't pickle local object 'WeakSet.__init__.._remove'

I wondering whether WeakSet should be made pickleable or the __reduce__ method 
should be removed. __reduce__() can be used also for copying, but  there are no 
tests for this feature.

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components: Library (Lib)
messages: 296243
nosy: georg.brandl, pitrou, rhettinger, serhiy.storchaka, twouters
priority: normal
severity: normal
status: open
title: WeakSet is not pickleable

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