Obvious question, but is there an easy way to run the Pip test suite using setuptools<69?

Some users pin their build dependencies either for their own project via pyproject.toml or for all their dependencies via PIP_CONSTRAINTS or using pip-tools.

You can test that by constraining setuptools in test/requirements.txt and tests/requirements-common_wheels.txt, and emptying the tests/data/common_wheels directory before running the nox test session.

Thanks, I tested this branch locally using setuptools<69 on Linux Python 3.11 and all tests passed.

I did have one flaky test test_download_info_archive_cache_with_invalid_origin but that seems flaky on first run every time I changed my environment, regardless of what branch I was running it against.

Thanks for confirming @notatallshaw. I have not experienced the flakyness myself, though.