Arvados

Python 3.12 will not preinstall setuptools in new virtualenvs. This will break our current build processes in various places. Doing this ticket would be the best way to get ahead of things.

Brett Smith wrote:

• Some of the interfaces of setup.py are deprecated (I think we're already getting warnings about this), and this gives us a clear migration path off those too.

To put more color on this: all of the interfaces of setup.py are deprecated. As the top of that post says,

This does not mean that setuptools itself is deprecated, or that using setup.py to configure your package builds is going to be removed. The only thing you must stop doing is directly executing the setup.py file — instead delegate that to purpose-built or standards-based tools, preferably those that work with any build backend.

We have been seeing this deprecation start to cause issues in some of our dependencies, which makes me think this migration is becoming more urgent.

For us, the path I think we want to take is: wherever we run setup.py install, run pip instead. We've already had a couple commits along these lines: see 20432a4533136a5ab9fa52c2e2ec2d90a855ecfb and upcoming d1e529905d4820ce450dc430139cccda83fefc72.

Wherever we run setup.py build, that needs to be updated to something like python -m build using the build module. There are other alternatives, this is just the simplest one I know about. However, before we can do that, we need to migrate to using at least pyproject.toml as specified in this ticket. Migrating setup.py build calls can either be part of this ticket, or a separate follow-up.