Can't find msbuild with 2.4.0+

[QuLogic]

Description

I'm trying to update Matplotlib into the latest cibuildwheel. However, I'm running to the problem on Windows that it cannot find msbuild. This fails with cibuildwheel 2.4.0, 2.5.0, or 2.6.0, but works with 2.3.1.

Bisecting points me to e5c210c (broken build vs previous commit).

Build log

https://github.com/QuLogic/matplotlib/runs/6604628328?check_suite_focus=true

CI config

https://github.com/QuLogic/matplotlib/blob/ba16d002d5bc55a5145589662a81b3ba22ba9503/.github/workflows/cibuildwheel.yml

[QuLogic]

Looking through that change, I see that there is a major upgrade of setuptools from 59.6.0 to 60.2.0, which includes the change:

#2896: Setuptools once again makes its local copy of distutils the default. To override, set SETUPTOOLS_USE_DISTUTILS=stdlib.

and indeed, if I add CIBW_ENVIRONMENT_WINDOWS: SETUPTOOLS_USE_DISTUTILS=stdlib, then the build passes.

However, I do not understand why this is necessary with cibuildwheel. We unfortunately do not have tests running on GitHub Actions for Windows, but do run tests on AppVeyor for Windows. However, in that case, we have setuptools-62.3.2 installed and do not need to use stdlib distutils.

[Czaki]

As I could see your appveyor builds are python 3.8 and 3.9 and failing cibuildwheel is python 3.10. Could you check if builds of 3.8 and 3.9 will work?

[henryiii]

Also your CI is using conda, I believe, which will be very different as far as compiler configuration.

[QuLogic]

No, it does not pass with 3.9 or 3.8.

I managed to cut away most the tests into a GitHub Action that only builds on Windows: https://github.com/QuLogic/matplotlib/actions/runs/2393780852
This fails on all versions with the same error.

I forgot about this, but we do some crazy hack to get the compiler search path:
https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/blob/6296e500cfbf6c5a9247a016a059505b9330bc9f/setupext.py#L528-L548
So I guess it's on us to fix...