I suspect this might be difficult, but I haven’t actually tried it. Our trick (and really setup tools itself relies on this too) is that setuptools monkey patches distutils at runtime to make distutils into setuptools. It only has to patch a few bits and pieces right now, but I suspect that if this happened it’d have to monkey patch the entire namespace. It would probably also break people who mix and match imports from setuptools and distutils.

Of course, maybe it won’t! Won’t know until we try it I suppose.