pip's wheel support requires setuptools >= 0.8 for dist-info support

[seaders at gmail.com]

I have a Jenkins server running Ubuntu which has been running perfectly fine for as long as I've been using it, and in one of the jobs, it runs a few things under the shiningpanda plugin (a python virtual environment wrapper).

At some point today, or over the weekend, the job that uses it started failing, with the main error seemingly being the title, full error reported is

  > pip install Jinja2
  Wheel installs require setuptools >= 0.8 for dist-info support.
  pip's wheel support requires setuptools >= 0.8 for dist-info support.

I've googled for this error, or anything like it, but I haven't been able to find anything useful towards solving it.