Package: python3-setuptools Version: 65.5.0-1 Severity: normal setuptools 60 uses its own bundled version of distutils, by default. It injects this into sys.modules, at import time. So we need to make sure that it is imported, before anything else imports distutils, to ensure everything is using the same distutils version.
I have filed a number of patches upstream to reorder packages setup.py imports, to avoid the problem. But today I discovered why we were the only ones hitting this problem: We don't ship distutils-precedence.pth which should hook this at interpreter startup time. We should ship it. There's an interpreter startup cost to pth files. But all setuptools users would expect us to have this. SR
