building petsc 3.7.0: python can't pickle file objects

[Drew Parsons <apps@emerall.com>]

I've created an experimental branch in the petsc repo to start testing
the build of petsc 3.7.0, 
https://anonscm.debian.org/git/debian-science/packages/petsc.git

Using the same configuration we had for petsc 3.6, configure fails with
the error:

can't pickle file objects
*******************************************************************************
   
   
  File "/home/projects/petsc/build/petsc/config/BuildSystem/config/framework.py", line 961, in processChildren
    child.configure()
  File "/home/projects/petsc/build/petsc/config/PETSc/Configure.py", line 1114, in configure
    self.framework.argDB['configureCache'] = cPickle.dumps(self.framework)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/copy_reg.py", line 70, in _reduce_ex
    raise TypeError, "can't pickle %s objects" % base.__name__
can't pickle file objects



Can anyone make sense of this error?  A simple configure (just
./configure) does complete successfully, so it's some problem in the
complex configure line that we're using. But I don't know which term is
causing the problem.

Has anyone started using petsc 3.7 for themselves yet?


Drew