Probably "what's different" is just that I decided to test qtconsole on by Sid guest VM. I would normally run qtconsole on my host Buster system, where jupyter_core/paths.py does not import from distutils.util, and besides python3-distutils is already installed since it's needed by other things I have installed like python3-pip and python3-dev. I doubt that I ever removed python3-distutils on Sid, it's just that I never installed anything that explicitly deps on it.
Still, jupyter_core/paths.py in 4.6.3 does have a runtime dependency on distutils.util, so I would recommend having python3-jupyter-core depend on python3-distutils just in case the latter hasn't been brought in by another dependency. -- James Ronald Lovell <ron163...@gmail.com> Huntsville, AL, USA
