Yikes. I like the env variable approach more than then set_module-on-all-classmethods approach. Is there a "hope for a fix upstream" option?

Is there a "hope for a fix upstream" option?

It seems feasible. The current behavior is due to

https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/9bf5100037f661f3a369d3ee539bec06f063b650/Lib/doctest.py#L1069-L1072

which was added in the commit python/cpython@8485b56. I don't think I can find any discussion due to the age here, so not clear if the added line was thought through. Removing the _from_module check would resolve.

A fix also seems possible in pytest - it overrides DoctestModule._from_module in some cases, and it seems like adding

if inspect.isfunction(object) and "." in object.__qualname__:
    return True

is a reliable way to ignore checking the module of attributes on a class. The class would only be recursed if it was already found to have the right __module__, so it should be safe to always return True here.

Not sure if either CPython or pytest would be on board with an upstream fix - one possible counter is that we shouldn't have a class's __module__ disagree with that of the methods of the class in the first place. But if one is in such a state, it's not clear to me why you would ever want to skip the methods defined in a class when that class is in the right module.

Edit:

Super hacky, but we can also do this ourselves.

def pytest_sessionstart(session):
    import doctest, inspect

    orig = doctest.DocTestFinder._from_module

    def _from_module(self, module, object):
        if inspect.isfunction(object) and "." in object.__qualname__:
            return True
        return orig(self, module, object)

    doctest.DocTestFinder._from_module = _from_module

It's unfortunate, but I'm OK with your pytest_sessionstart solution. I suppose this was an unforeseen side effect of customizing our __module__ attribute.

It would be interesting to survey other projects that override __module__ and how they are running their doctests, if any.