DEPS: remove distutils

[fangchenli]

distutils is deprecated in Python 3.10, it will be removed in 3.12.

https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0632/ has a section about migration.

xref #41113

[jorisvandenbossche]

We mostly use distutils for its version checking, and the alternative for that is packaging. That's however not a standard library module, but an external package that would either need to be added as a dependency, or otherwise be vendored (just the packaging.version submodule, which is only a few hundred lines of python code)

[bashtage]

What is the rush? Won't there will be a Python-provided equivalent of LooseVersion before distutils is removed?

[jorisvandenbossche]

Won't there will be a Python-provided equivalent of LooseVersion before distutils is removed?

There doesn't seem to be any plan for that, they point to packaging