I tried to run “pysetup metadata” in a docutils source directory but the program failed, because packaging tries to import docutils and it picks up the 2.x version in the local directory.

The import chain is: pysetup → packaging.run → packaging.metadata → docutils

I could edit sys.path in pysetup, but that would mean that people calling “python3.y -m packaging.run” would not get the fix.  Another idea would be to catch both ImportError and SyntaxError when packaging.metadata tries to import docutils, but it would be better to find the 3.x version of docutils in site-packages if it exists.

What do you import experts think?