Replace distutils with setuptools

[brandonwillard]

This PR replaces distutils imports with the equivalent setuptools imports, in anticipation of distutils's deprecation.

The numpy.distutils changes in this PR may affect the "dynamic" determination of build settings, since the old numpy.distutils.system_info.get_info appears to rely on the discovered pkg-config binary in one step, and that binary could be arbitrarily changed. The approach used in this PR—i.e. numpy.__config__.get_info—relies on the system_info settings at the time when numpy was built, and appears to return the appropriate environment-specific library/include paths.

Since the underlying parameters are all still configurable via aesara.config and/or environment variables, I'm not too concerned about losing any fringe functionality with this change, especially not when the parameters we're trying to obtain are explicitly the parameters used by NumPy (i.e. the ones given by numpy.__config__.get_info), and not the ones given by an arbitrary pkg-config in one's path or the like. My guess is that the latter actually leads to more errors and confusion than benefits.

[brandonwillard]

I wonder if these changes help with #1005, #980, and conda-forge/aesara-feedstock#54.

[codecov]

Codecov Report

Attention: Patch coverage is 83.33333% with 3 lines in your changes missing coverage. Please review.

Project coverage is 79.25%. Comparing base (d69eaab) to head (1f31a97).
Report is 505 commits behind head on main.

Files	Patch %	Lines
aesara/link/c/cmodule.py	78.57%	3 Missing ⚠️

Additional details and impacted files

@@            Coverage Diff             @@
##             main    #1050      +/-   ##
==========================================
- Coverage   79.25%   79.25%   -0.01%     
==========================================
  Files         152      152              
  Lines       47887    47882       -5     
  Branches    10909    10909              
==========================================
- Hits        37955    37949       -6     
- Misses       7435     7436       +1     
  Partials     2497     2497              

Files	Coverage Δ
aesara/configdefaults.py	66.20% <100.00%> (ø)
aesara/link/c/exceptions.py	80.00% <100.00%> (ø)
aesara/tensor/blas.py	79.71% <100.00%> (-0.02%)	⬇️
aesara/link/c/cmodule.py	54.34% <78.57%> (-0.23%)	⬇️

[brandonwillard]

@aesara-devs/core, I'm ready to merge this, but I'm a little unsure about the setuptools dependency added to setup.py. Since we use setuptools at run-time now, it seems appropriate, but it's also understood to be present as a requirement for the Aesara installation itself, and I'm not sure how the version dependency aspects of that should work.

[maresb]

I don't use setuptools very much, but you might consider adding a pyproject.toml and seeing to what extent you can replace setup.py (imperative) and setup.cfg (declarative) with that.

For the Aesara installation itself, the pyproject.toml would define your build system to be setuptools and define any additional build-time requirements (plugins) there. Correspondingly on the Conda side, those are put into the host requirements. So based on the above, we will need to add setuptools as both a host and run requirement in the recipe.

I see that you very rarely change the dependencies, so it generally makes sense to have bot-automerge is enabled on the feedstock. However with the current change, this will cause the autotick-bot PR to merge on passing CI, but a passing CI does not indicate that the recipe is correct. (For instance, there may be a missing direct dependency which is coincidentally added indirectly.)

I recommend disabling automerge, at least for now, so that we can make sure the dependencies are correctly declared. You can always add the automerge label to an individual PR.