The future of Python build systems and Gentoo


Over the years, the distutils stdlib module has been used to build setup.py scripts for Python packages. In addition to the baseline functions providing a build system CLI for the package, it provided the ability to easily extend the build system. This led both to growth of heavily customized setup.py scripts as part of some packages, as well as third-party build systems based on distutils, most notably setuptools.
This eventually led to deprecation of distutils themselves (see: PEP 632). Python 3.10 is already warning of distutils deprecation, and the current plan is to remove it in Python 3.12. Ahead of that, the development has moved to a dedicated pypa/distutils repository, and the copy of that is bundled within setuptools.
setuptools still uses the stdlib distutils by default. However, some packages already switch to the bundled copy, and upstream plans on using it by default in the future (see: Porting from Distutils).
At this point, I don’t think there is an explicit need for Gentoo to act here. However, it seems reasonable to avoid using distutils as the build system for Gentoo projects. Since the setuptools copy of distutils is different from the one included in CPython (and PyPy) and at the moment it does not carry the full set of historical Gentoo patches, it probably makes sense to test package compatibility with it nevertheless.
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