distutils dependency

[faerytea]

According to https://docs.python.org/3/whatsnew/3.12.html#whatsnew312-removed-distutils , distutils are removed from python 3.12.

setuptools are good drop-in replacement, so we can just replace dependency to python3-distutils to python3-setuptools. However, I only tested it on Debian trixie.

[ItsNilDev]

do you also get the 'nohup.out' error?

[faerytea]

Yes, but I cannot figure out what problems this might cause. Everything I use works like a clock.

[zahlman]

I had a look through the .deb to see how distutils is actually used in the current code. As far as I can tell, it's only in a single file:

core/df.py

# ...
from distutils import dir_util
# ...
def install_extras():
    # ...
    if not os.access(install_file, os.F_OK):
        log.i('Installing extras content for first time')
        dir_util.copy_tree(extras_dir, paths.get('df'))
        # ...

As noted, Distutils was part of the standard library until Python 3.11, and removed in 3.12. Debian etc. packaged it separately, and now that package is gone matching the standard library removal.

The functionality described is just a utility for iterating over a directory and copying the files. It should be trivial to replace this with shutil.copytree which has also been available in the standard library for approximately forever (since at least 2.0). So there's really no reason to have this dependency at all. Distutils (already extremely outdated at the time of removal) was intended to support Python tools used for packaging other Python code for distribution, so this use was also arguably a bit off-label.

However, I couldn't readily figure out which component provides this file...

[faerytea]

However, I couldn't readily figure out which component provides this file...

this, from PyLNP (afaik, forge-lnp just downloads release). Should we patch it through regexp for old python-lnp versions? This was patched (if version guard) 2y ago.

[zahlman]

@faerytea I see. It looks like the distutils version was used to provide the functionality of not erroring on (i.e. merging into) already-existing directories, and the patch was done after the latest release. But as you say, that patch was still a couple of years ago, and was right around the last commit. Has the project been abandoned?