Exception when pickle.dumps(DeclarativeObject) with sqlalchemy.ext.mutable.Mutable field

Hi there,

today we noticed an explosion when we tried to pickle.dumps one of our model objects with an error like this:

pickle.PicklingError: Can't pickle <function remove at 0x107afcb90>: it's not found as weakref.remove

Googling we found this: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/sqlalchemy/b3eoWwhKriI which lead us to reduce the issue to this sample code which seems to be pretty minimal in showing the error:

#!/usr/bin/env python

import json
from sqlalchemy import types



# Basically stolen from
# http://docs.sqlalchemy.org/en/rel_0_8/core/types.html#marshal-json-strings
class JSONEncodedDict(types.TypeDecorator):
    """Represents an immutable structure as a json-encoded string.

    Usage::
        JSONEncodedDict(255)

    Made mutation aware by the MutableDict below!

    Defaults to an empty dict if read as NULL from the DB for migration friendliness.
    """

    impl = types.VARCHAR
    python_type = dict

    def process_bind_param(self, value, dialect):
        if value is not None:
            value = json.dumps(value)

        return value

    def process_result_value(self, value, dialect):
        if value is not None:
            value = json.loads(value, object_hook=dict)
        else:
            value = {}
        return value



from sqlalchemy.ext.mutable import Mutable

class MutableDict(Mutable, dict):
    @classmethod
    def coerce(cls, key, value):
        "Convert plain dictionaries to MutableDict."

        if not isinstance(value, MutableDict):
            if isinstance(value, dict):
                return MutableDict(value)

            # this call will raise ValueError
            return Mutable.coerce(key, value)
        else:
            return value

    def __setitem__(self, key, value):
        "Detect dictionary set events and emit change events."

        dict.__setitem__(self, key, value)
        self.changed()

    def __delitem__(self, key):
        "Detect dictionary del events and emit change events."

        dict.__delitem__(self, key)
        self.changed()

MutableDict.associate_with(JSONEncodedDict)


from sqlalchemy.ext.declarative import declarative_base
Base = declarative_base(constructor=None)

from sqlalchemy import Column, Integer

class User(Base):
    __tablename__ = 'user'

    id = Column("iduser", Integer, primary_key=True)
    settings = Column(JSONEncodedDict(4096), default=dict)


from sqlalchemy import create_engine
from sqlalchemy.orm import scoped_session, sessionmaker

engine = create_engine('sqlite://')
DBSession = scoped_session(sessionmaker())
DBSession.configure(bind=engine)
Base.metadata.bind = engine
Base.metadata.create_all()

import pickle

user = User()
DBSession.add(user)
DBSession.flush()
pickle.dumps(user)
print('Worked')

This still errors in the latest version from pypi (1.0.8).

What can you make from this? It looks like an error to us - but maybe we're using mutable wrong?

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