Classifiers were always documented as lists (msg214915) and passing a non-list type was raised a cryptic exception message as already reported in my first message, https://github.com/pypa/setuptools/issues/1163 and https://reinbach.com/blog/setuptools-classifiers-upload-python3-5/

Any usage of classifiers=(...,) is already broken in Python 3 in some way (see the setup.py I attached or https://reinbach.com/blog/setuptools-classifiers-upload-python3-5/ for a quick reproducer) since they can't upload a new release.

Also, this is only an issue when sdist is the only way to install the project. exifread only provides a wheel for Python 2. I cloned it and add

    [wheel]
    universal = 1

then I created a universal wheel and tried to install it in Python 3.7.0a2+:

    Processing /home/berker/projects/test/exif-py/dist/ExifRead-2.1.2-py2.py3-none-any.whl
    Installing collected packages: ExifRead
    Successfully installed ExifRead-2.1.2