AWS has now locked the discussion on their bug report: https://github.com/aws/aws-cli/issues/4947#issuecomment-793192340 Sadly, they will not change their stance towards publishing proper source packages of awscli and botocore on PyPI. On the positive side, they promised to bundle the source code in a manner that is easier to build and package. I suppose this will mean that the packaging scripts will need to be overhauled when they do publish bundled sources...