Stop using distutils

[webknjaz]

It's deprecated. Python 3.10 raises a DeprecationWarning and Python 3.12 won't have it in the stdlib anymore.
Why fix it now and not wait for another 2 years when this will produce an ImportError? Because it's nice to solve such problems ahead of time and also since ansible-runner is a library, it also causes these warnings (or even errors with pytest's filterwarning = error or python -Werror ¹) for the projects that have Python 3.10 in their test matrixes. In particular, it's been observed in ansible-navigator.

Footnotes

1. Learn more at https://docs.python.org/dev/using/cmdline.html#cmdoption-W ↩

[cidrblock]

In case this might help

  File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/home/bthornto/github/ansible-navigator/src/ansible_navigator/runner/__init__.py", line 4, in <module>
    from .ansible_config import AnsibleConfig
  File "/home/bthornto/github/ansible-navigator/src/ansible_navigator/runner/ansible_config.py", line 8, in <module>
    from ansible_runner import get_ansible_config  # type: ignore[import]
  File "/home/bthornto/github/ansible-navigator/venv/lib64/python3.10/site-packages/ansible_runner/__init__.py", line 3, in <module>
    from .interface import run, run_async, \
  File "/home/bthornto/github/ansible-navigator/venv/lib64/python3.10/site-packages/ansible_runner/interface.py", line 27, in <module>
    from ansible_runner.config.runner import RunnerConfig
  File "/home/bthornto/github/ansible-navigator/venv/lib64/python3.10/site-packages/ansible_runner/config/runner.py", line 27, in <module>
    from distutils.dir_util import copy_tree
  File "/usr/lib64/python3.10/distutils/__init__.py", line 19, in <module>
    warnings.warn(_DEPRECATION_MESSAGE,
DeprecationWarning: The distutils package is deprecated and slated for removal in Python 3.12. Use setuptools or check PEP 632 for potential alternatives

[cidrblock]

We were adding some code to navigator to check for ciruclar import before enabling isort and came across this. The distutils warning was suppressed, so it's not blocking anything, but since we came across it, thought it would be good to let you all now.

[AlanCoding]

Do you have any good suggestion for an alternative to LooseVersion? I was not very happy with any that I saw.

[sivel]

Do you have any good suggestion for an alternative to LooseVersion? I was not very happy with any that I saw.

packaging.version is the recommended alternative. However, in core, we actually vendored distutils.version for now.

[AlanCoding]

License-wise, can we add that module to runner (and then reuse in AWX)? We have this problem in a couple of projects.

https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/8d1cf7f266d7a81c248838917f8df5475e4439b9/lib/ansible/module_utils/compat/version.py

[Shrews]

This should be somewhat simple to do. I see runner using distutils for the following cases:

• distutils.spawn.find_executable() : We can replace this with shutil.which()
• distutils.dir_util.copy_tree() : We can replace this with shutil.copytree(). Why the distutils version was even used is perplexing.
• disutils.version.LooseVersion() : This is only used in our test suite to skip certain tests when run using a version of Ansible that is less than 2.8. Our tests use only 2.9 or higher, so we could just rip this out.