Hi there!

Our project (the Python bindings of ROOT) uses inside the Python module a "facade" object to do some magic with the lookups in the module and this causes issues with cloudpickle, which shows up when using dask. However, this facade object, derived from a types.ModuleType, has never caused issues, also when using the standard pickle in the Python standard library.

Below you can find a standalone reproducer, which shows that the standard pickle is fine with such a construct but cloudpickle fails with the error message TypeError: cannot pickle 'Facade' object.

Edit: We have found out that we can move the import my_module line inside the function foo as a workaround. I hope this gives an hint to the underlying issue!

# Define the module facade and inject it as module

import sys
from types import ModuleType

class Facade(ModuleType):
    def __init__(self, name):
        super().__init__(name)
        self.foo = 42

sys.modules['my_module'] = Facade('my_module')

# Pickle a function which uses the module with the facade

import my_module

import cloudpickle as pickle # breaks with cloudpickle
#import pickle # works fine with the standard pickle

def foo():
    my_module.foo
    return 42

with open('f.pkl', 'wb') as f:
    pickle.dump(foo, f) # Breaks with "TypeError: cannot pickle 'Facade' object"

Python: 3.8.6
cloudpickle: 1.6.0