setuptools: ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'six'

Building setuptools in the standard way I’ve used forever fails:

# /usr/pkg/bin/python3.6  setup.py  build
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "setup.py", line 11, in <module>
    import setuptools
  File ".../setuptools-34.1.1/setuptools/__init__.py", line 10, in <module>
    from six.moves import filter, map
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'six'

It looks like setuptools now added a six dependency, which breaks distributions that build from scratch, because six uses setuptools for installation (dependency cycle).

[0-wiz-0]

For anyone else stumbling over this issue, my solution was:

• install the setuptools version that is coming with python, using python -m ensurepip --user
• build and install appdirs, six, pyparsing, and packaging with this version
• build setuptools
• delete the --user installation of the old version

[maxguxiao]

I got the same problem after I upgrade python2.7.10 to python2.7.13.

None of the above works for me. Finally, I fixed this by download six package directly from pypi, then go to the download directory, and manually installed it by using python set-up.py install.