pip - Why is 'pip3 install netifaces' failing on Debian 10 Buster?

Question

I setup a new Debian 10 (Buster) instance on AWS EC2, and was able to install a pip3 package that depended on netifaces, but when I came back to it the next day the package is breaking reporting an error in netifaces. If I try to run pip3 install netifaces I get the same error:

~$ pip3 install netifaces
Collecting netifaces
  Using cached https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/0d/18/fd6e9c71a35b67a73160ec80a49da63d1eed2d2055054cc2995714949132/netifaces-0.10.9.tar.gz
    Complete output from command python setup.py egg_info:
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
      File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/setuptools/__init__.py", line 20, in <module>
        from setuptools.dist import Distribution, Feature
      File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/setuptools/dist.py", line 35, in <module>
        from setuptools.depends import Require
      File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/setuptools/depends.py", line 7, in <module>
        from .py33compat import Bytecode
      File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/setuptools/py33compat.py", line 55, in <module>
        unescape = getattr(html, 'unescape', html_parser.HTMLParser().unescape)
    AttributeError: 'HTMLParser' object has no attribute 'unescape'

Answer 1

HTMLParser().unescape was removed in Python 3.9. Compare the code in Python 3.8 vs Python 3.9.

The error seems to be a bug in setuptools. Try to upgrade setuptools. Or use Python 3.8.