>>> Yikes, I had hoped to avoid addressing that Nix issue and the humongous
>>> "fix" for a while longer:
>>>
>>> https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/12552
>>
>> This puill-request is huge, but for setuptools, it comes down that they
>> updated from 18.2 to 19.4.
>
> Sounds like we're going down the same road. I've started a branch with
> the earlier patch and a few other fixes. Is it ok to overwrite the
> existing 'python-updates' branch on Savannah?

There are some commits in python-updates that haven't made its way into
any other branches. I created a new branch 'python-tests' for this fix.

Please build and fix as much as possible. I'd like to get this merged
ASAP. @Leo can you start this branch on Hydra?