It was only working in python2 before now anyway. ( https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/650) pip is fundamentally dependent on setuptools to perform upgrades.
with distribute-0.6.X upgrades, even though pip uninstalled distribute as part of the upgrade, it ran the install subprocess with the cwd equal to the build dir, so it could import setuptools from the unpacked download. but now, distribute-0.7 is just a shell, that contains no importable setuptools that pip can use. we could *make* it work I guess, by enforcing non-standard logic when dealing with distribute (i.e. get setuptools-0.7 installed first; by default, setuptools gets queued to be installed after the distribute upgrade) but like I said before, it's much more motivating to think about PEP439, than this dreary setuptools/distribute legacy headache stuff. Marcus
the best fix I think is to move faster on making pip "PEP439 compliant" - i.e. have pip be able to at least install from wheels w/o needing setuptools, which would remove the bootstrap headache - see https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/863 - this could likely involve pip replacing it's use of pkg_resources with distlib (https://github.com/pypa/pip/pull/909)
Marcus