ImportError: The 'packaging' package is required - issues since setuptools 19.3

Originally reported by: denfromufa (Bitbucket: denfromufa, GitHub: denfromufa)

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pyinstaller/pyinstaller#1781

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• Bitbucket: https://bitbucket.org/pypa/setuptools/issue/517

[cas--]

Will this issue be fixed in setuptools?

It looks like it might be related to this commit: 9b985a9

[jaraco]

The issue is not with setuptools, but with the way pyinstaller discovers packages. The issue is caused by the fact that setuptools now has to vendor some packages (packaging, six, pyparser), but because it imports them programmatically, pyinstaller fails to detect the need to include those packages.

I imagine there are a couple ways to address the issue.

• setuptools could provide a hook file for pyinstaller to declare which files or modules should be whitelisted. I know the keyring project has had to do something similar for the modules that it programmatically imports.
• application packagers using setuptools could include the dependency packages explicitly.

There is also talk of Setuptools dropping support for installing itself, which would enable it to declare its dependencies and import them naturally, which would also address this issue, but I don't think we can count on that for this issue.

Can someone affected by the pyinstaller issue try creating the hook file?

[cas--]

The changes have broken compatibility with pyinstaller, py2app, bbfreeze, cxfreeze and py2exe are you sure there is nothing that can be done in setuptools to remedy this?

[jaraco]

The problem is inherent in the vendoring technique. It's conceivable that the extern technique could be replaced with explicit try/except imports all throughout the codebase, but that would be ugly and error-prone, which is why I've avoided that. I'm open to other suggestions too, but there's no clean fix as far as I know.