DEPS/CLN: remove distutils usage

[fangchenli]

• close DEPS: remove distutils #41199

[jreback]

hmm didn't realize packaging is a thing.

cc @pandas-dev/pandas-core any comments.

[jorisvandenbossche]

As mentioned on the issue, we can also vendor the part of the code of packaging that we need (#41199 (comment))

[bashtage]

Why not wait? Python 3.12 is a long way off, and there maybe an official equivalent of LooseVersion in the standard library by then.

[jreback]

Why not wait? Python 3.12 is a long way off, and there maybe an official equivalent of LooseVersion in the standard library by then.

deprecation warnings!

i don't think vendoring would be very hard (and this is in general a nice cleaning anyhow)

[bashtage]

deprecation warnings!

Could just import it once in a compat module and catch the deprecation warning.

[jorisvandenbossche]

I don't think waiting (and add warning catching as workaround for now) would help much. We will have to otherwise do it in 2 years anyway, and they don't plan to add an alternative to the stdlib.

For reference, this is the PR that vendored it in pyarrow: https://github.com/apache/arrow/pull/9849/files#diff-01d967ca0c7171567d28b14f96289b349089dcab833c61a83d88f3fb72303591

[jreback]

yeah +1 on vendoring.

[bashtage]

If they really aren't going to provide a simple mechanism to handle versioning OOB, then vendoring is the next best. Still total PITA.

[jreback]

If they really aren't going to provide a simple mechanism to handle versioning OOB, then vendoring is the next best. Still total PITA.

for sure! but this is slightly better than existing

[jreback]

looks good. can you rebase after #41327 is merged and ping on green.

[simonjayhawkins]

@fangchenli #41327 now merged

[jreback]

thanks @fangchenli very nice!