difficulty testing distutils

[jaraco]

While attempting to enroll distutils in coherent, I ran into another issue.

Because the coherent system uses setuptools_scm, and because setuptools_scm depends on setuptools, and because setuptools has a hack to supply distutils, by the time pytest gets around to importing distutils.conftest, the import fails because that module doesn't exist (as a submodule of setuptools._distutils).

I tried disabling that distutils hack, but that doesn't work because setuptools_scm actually imports setuptools during the project setup, so some distutils needs to be available for installation prior to pytest being invoked.

My instinct is to try to get setuptools out of the dependency tree, but that probably means replacing setuptools_scm with something else. Fortunately, I have some work in progress with jaraco.vcs to potentially do that.