Description
setuptools version 60.0.0 made the local copy of distutils the default. Due to this change, certain import orders of distutils and setuptools seem to cause problems, cf. pypa/setuptools#3439 and pypa/setuptools#3089. Current pandas.show_versions
suffers from the same problem, and as a result cannot report versions when opening issues.
Users can get around this by setting the environment variable SETUPTOOLS_USE_DISTUTILS=stdlib
, but they may not know to do so. One option would just be to just change the issue template to ask users to execute SETUPTOOLS_USE_DISTUTILS=stdlib python -c "import pandas; pandas.show_versions()"
, but I don't know if this error is persistent across all Python versions, or if it will be an issue until Python 3.12 (when distutils is officially removed).