pip error: ` invalid command 'egg_info'`

[mborsetti]

$ pip install pycairo
Collecting pycairo
  Downloading pycairo-1.21.0.tar.gz (340 kB)
     ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 340.7/340.7 KB 3.9 MB/s eta 0:00:00
  Installing build dependencies ... done
  Getting requirements to build wheel ... error
  error: subprocess-exited-with-error

  × Getting requirements to build wheel did not run successfully.
  │ exit code: 1
  ╰─> [8 lines of output]
      /usr/local/lib/python3.9/dist-packages/setuptools/_distutils/dist.py:275: UserWarning: Unknown distribution option: 'python_requires'
        warnings.warn(msg)
      usage: setup.py [global_opts] cmd1 [cmd1_opts] [cmd2 [cmd2_opts] ...]
         or: setup.py --help [cmd1 cmd2 ...]
         or: setup.py --help-commands
         or: setup.py cmd --help

      error: invalid command 'egg_info'
      [end of output]

  note: This error originates from a subprocess, and is likely not a problem with pip.
error: subprocess-exited-with-error

× Getting requirements to build wheel did not run successfully.
│ exit code: 1
╰─> See above for output.

note: This error originates from a subprocess, and is likely not a problem with pip.

[mborsetti]

Turned out to be corruption in the setuptools installation.

[QuentiumYT]

Turned out to be corruption in the setuptools installation.

What id you do to prevent the corruption?