AFAIK this might not be true if other build systems not using setuptools 
at all might show up. And isn't this the main reason for all your work?

No, try

Sorry, I've been inprecise on this:

There might still be quite some packages out there importing plain, old distutils (and not setuptools) in their setup.py. These are what I meant with "other build systems not using setuptools". For these setup.py to understand the options we (and pip) need for installation, "import distutils" has to be hacked to actually become "import setuptools" - which is what setuptools-shim does

-- 
Regards
Hartmut Goebel

| Hartmut Goebel          | h.goebel@crazy-compilers.com               |
| www.crazy-compilers.com | compilers which you thought are impossible |