ModuleNotFoundError when using setup.cfg and version accessed with attr

I have a Python package with the following structure:

├── setup.cfg
├── setup.py
└── src
    └── myproject
        ├── base.py
        ├── __init__.py
        └── version.py

In setup.cfg, the version is defined with attr:

[metadata]
name = myproject
version = attr: myproject.version.__version__

With version.py being simply:

__version__ = "1.2.3"

The package have dependencies listed in setup.cfg. On the other hand, the package's top level __init__.py imports some objects of the package:

from myproject.base import Stuff

__all__ = ["Stuff"]

And, obviously, base.py imports some objects from the dependencies.

The problem is now that if I try to use python setup.py when the dependencies are not installed, I have a ModuleNotFoundError/ImportError, since __init__.py imports objects importing these dependencies (this is very to case 6 in the Python documentation on managing version file):

python setup.py --version
Traceback (most recent call last):
<snip>
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'dependency_module'

which makes installation of the dependencies impossible. So what should be the best strategy to target the version file?

So far, I have tried this weird exception handling approach on __init__.py:

try:
    from myproject.base import Stuff
except ImportError:
    pass

Is there a better way? Or another approach?