Failing to pip install in CI: Unknown distribution option: 'use_scm_version'

[Simon Willison]

I've been getting this error in CI. Is this a bug in the way django-test-plus is packaged?

Key line is Unknown distribution option: 'use_scm_version'

Collecting django-test-plus==1.4.0
  Downloading django-test-plus-1.4.0.tar.gz (20 kB)
    ERROR: Command errored out with exit status 1:
     command: /home/circleci/project/venv/bin/python3 -c 'import sys, setuptools, tokenize; sys.argv[0] = '"'"'/tmp/pip-install-e7g9l9vl/django-test-plus_2923731c9a704ae989c0dbc3c6a4801b/setup.py'"'"'; __file__='"'"'/tmp/pip-install-e7g9l9vl/django-test-plus_2923731c9a704ae989c0dbc3c6a4801b/setup.py'"'"';f=getattr(tokenize, '"'"'open'"'"', open)(__file__);code=f.read().replace('"'"'\r\n'"'"', '"'"'\n'"'"');f.close();exec(compile(code, __file__, '"'"'exec'"'"'))' egg_info --egg-base /tmp/pip-pip-egg-info-q0dh6bzq
         cwd: /tmp/pip-install-e7g9l9vl/django-test-plus_2923731c9a704ae989c0dbc3c6a4801b/
    Complete output (27 lines):
    /usr/local/lib/python3.6/distutils/dist.py:261: UserWarning: Unknown distribution option: 'use_scm_version'
      warnings.warn(msg)

I can't find use_scm_version in the django-test-plus source code so I'm a bit puzzled as to what is going on here.

[Simon Willison]

The fix was to run pip install -U setuptools.