RANT why the *%#&%^ does installing pip not install setuptools???

[Steven D'Aprano]

I'm trying to install pip on a Linux Mint box. The maintainers of Mint 
(or possibly their upstream distro, Ubuntu) decided in their infinite 
wisdom to remove the ensurepip package, so

    python3 -m ensurepip 

fails ("No module named ensurepip"). Okay, let's do this the hard way:

    sudo apt install python3-pip

Yay, that worked! So then I try using it:

    python3 -m pip install blahblahblah

and after downloading the entire package, it crashes:

    ImportError: No module named 'setuptools'

because *of course* why would you treat setuptools as a dependency of 
pip, just because it happens to be a dependency of pip? That would be too 
sensible.

    sudo apt install python3-setuptools

fixed the issue. But now I want to go out and kick puppies.

/rant




-- 
Steven D'Aprano
"Ever since I learned about confirmation bias, I've been seeing
it everywhere." -- Jon Ronson