Need to port from distutils to setuptools

[adamjstewart]

The setup.py for pymol still uses distutils. Distutils was deprecated in Python 3.10 and will be removed in 3.12. Package authors are encouraged to use setuptools (should contain identical functionality and more) or another build backend like flit/poetry.

Porting should be as simple as replacing all distutils.sysconfig with sysconfig and all other calls to distutils with setuptools. In fact, pip already does the latter automatically behind the scenes. In the case of pymol, monkeypatch_distutils.py seems to be messing up argument parsing, because a pip install . in the source directory crashes when some setuptools flags are used.

[TstewDev]

Hello Adam, we are aware of this issue and have a ticket for it already! I'll get back to you here once it's fixed and then close the issue.

[JarrettSJohnson]

disutils replacement via sysconfig & cmake by 74ffc07ea75fe2237b278de095ba95cf843d08c6 and #362 And pip installation addressed by # #363