Hi, I'm a developer for the Spack package manager. We've had a setuptools package that has worked fine for a while now, and the vast majority of our Python packages depend on it. However, I went to update to the latest version of setuptools and noticed that it now depends on six, packaging, and appdirs. Unfortunately all 3 of these packages also depend on setuptools. six and packaging can fall back on distutils.core if necessary, but the setup.py for appdirs has a hard setuptools import.

It seems to me like it is no longer possible to build setuptools from source. Is this correct??