deprecation of `distutils`upstream for python >= 3.12 about skia-python

[HinTak]

The first time I tried python -m build --wheel (it is --wheel, not --format wheel), I got "No such module build". Obviously I have never built python package that way before, despite about a decade of misc python usage :-).

It seems both of these deprecation messages came from python setup.py ... . Switching to python -m build ..., both of them disappeared. But it is a lot slower. The stackoverflow url you refers to says "Sometimes pip uses make to build dependencies" so defining MAKEFLAGS works. That's not the case here. Switching to -m build ... loses not only parallel build for me, but also seems to disable ccache (probably because of using virtualenv). So it is a lot slow for me for both fresh build and incremental build.

Since both came from python setup.py ..., I am okay to just close this (as it is my personal preference...) - I'll just continue this way as long as it works for me, ignore the warnings, until it does not. The parallel build setting could do better though. -m build --wheel is not using multi-CPUs. (Skia itself is - ninja auto-detect number of CPUs, I think).

[kyamagu]

Perhaps it's a good time to migrate the build configuration to python -m build with the pyproject.toml configuration.
https://setuptools.pypa.io/en/latest/userguide/ext_modules.html

As far as I remember, the use of numpy distutils is to speed up the wheel compilation. Maybe not needed.

[HinTak]

Okay, that makes sense - I was wondering why it is try: ... except: pass doing nothing for not found. In that case it is just cosmetic, so I'd suggest adding a python version check to by-pass those few lines, to suppress the warning. I can add that at some point in time.

[kyamagu]

At this point, I would completely remove the numpy.distutils hack. It seems pip supports parallel jobs as of now.

[HinTak]

I removed the numpy section and it looks fine, but there is actually a 2nd deprecatioin after that (it is in above, just overlooked):

/usr/lib/python3.12/site-packages/setuptools/__init__.py:84: _DeprecatedInstaller: setuptools.installer and fetch_build_eggs are deprecated.

[kyamagu]

@HinTak Can you try python -m build --format wheel? Directly calling python setup.py build is deprecated.

[HinTak]

Okay - I'll give it a try. Despite the deprecation warning about 3.12, it is still working on 3.12 at the moment...

[kyamagu]

Sure, you can ignore the warning for a moment