Distutils and setuptools projects that populate the same namespace
package do not play well together. Setuptools is smart enough to
skip installation of the namespace package's dummy __init__.py file
and its ancillary .pyc or __pycache__ files, but distutils is not.
Distutils projects that use namespace packages are likely to disrupt
package managers that protect against two packages trying to install
the same files.

It is relatively rare these days to find Python projects that use
distutils directly rather than setuptools. In fact, the official
Python standard library documentation for distutils
(https://docs.python.org/3/library/distutils.html) says:

> Most Python users will not want to use this module directly, but
> instead use the cross-version tools maintained by the Python
> Packaging Authority.

Switching python-ligo-lw from distutils to setuptools simplifies
software packaging.