Actually Lib/_osx_support.py directly imports only five modules: os, re and sys at top level, and contextlib and tempfile in _read_output(). These last two aren't really needed at all, and there's no point even trying to avoid importing os and sys, so the only real problem is re which imports lots of other modules. It might be possible to avoid using re (the regular expressions don't look very complicated) but I noticed that some functions are only ever called from distutils, so maybe they should be moved from _osx_support to distutils._osx_support before doing anything else. I'm willing to do that if it's considered a good idea.