Eli Bendersky wrote on Thu, Jan 03, 2013 at 14:44:02 +0000:
> If this change is required (even if we choose to name it
> "xml.etree.ElementTree.Element" for Py compatibility to fix the pickling
> regression, we may find ourselves in a need to change it between 3.3 and
> 3.3.1 and I'm not sure if that's valid. I hope my question on pydev will be
> resolved conclusively.
> 
> Danial, could you investigate if such a change is absolutely required to
> make pickling/unickling of Element work?

There are a few options:

- Change c-Element's tp_name to "xml.etree.ElementTree.Element".

- Register a reduce function for c-Element's that serialises them by
  constructing an equivalent py-Element and returning the latter's
  .__dict__ via the third return value:
  http://docs.python.org/3/library/copyreg#copyreg.pickle

- Add an entry mapping "builtins.Element" to
  "xml.etree.ElementTree.Element" to _compat_pickle.IMPORT_MAPPING
  (which is used by Lib/pickle.py:_Pickler.find_class()).

I haven't tried to implement either of these approaches.