Plan for distutils removal in Python 3.12

[JamieMagee]

The distutils module in Python was deprecated in Python 3.10¹ and is planned to be removed entirely in Python 3.12. Our Python detector is currently based around distutils². Python 3.12 is due to be released in October 2023³.

There are some suggested migration paths in the release notes for Python 3.10¹.

AB#2095297

Footnotes

1. https://docs.python.org/3/whatsnew/3.10.html#distutils-deprecated ↩ ↩²

2. https://github.com/microsoft/component-detection/blob/2d5a418320e23f019f67b59e191ac72b5f8d9666/docs/detectors/pip.md#detection-strategy ↩

3. https://peps.python.org/pep-0602/ ↩

[jenshnielsen]

Another shortcoming of the python detector is that it does not respect pep517 build dependencies. Which means that this code will fail if the user imports something not in the current environment. This is made worse by the fact that this error is silent see #242

Having direct support for declarative specifications of dependencies as in #243 would help making this less of an issue

[jenshnielsen]

Are there any news on this. Release candidate 1 of python 3.12 is out and the release of 3.12.0 is expected for Oktober.

[cobya]

We are preparing the new pip installation report detector for validation on our next release. It is not an experimental detector!