Futureproofing: Removing distutils dependencies

[AndroxxTraxxon]

Python has been warning that distutils will be removed for a while now, and the retirement is official in Python3.12, so this is my attempt at removing/replacing distutils functionality.

I opted to not replace the pip version check in the st2client package because Pip 6.1.0 (April 2015) was released before Python 3.6 (Dec. 2016, already EOL) existed, and we specify the pip version in the Makefile. I'm sure we can find a way to get packaging installed for the version check, or to replace it with a custom-rolled replacement comparison if the community deems it necessary.

I could also see the argument for removing that check from the fixate-requirements.py script as well, but I wanted to show the most commonly recommended replacement for distutils.version.

This change is similar to the one made for the Orquesta package here, basically just removing functionality that's been deprecated for a while and is officially removed in an upcoming version of Python: StackStorm/orquesta#253

[AndroxxTraxxon]

I had to remove the Pip version check in its entirety in order to remain compatible to Python 3.6. It does make me wonder if it should still be supported, since it's already past EOL.

[nzlosh]

Is the trailing slash intentional here?

[nzlosh]

Overall the change looks good to me. I do wonder if the pip checks should disabled rather than completely removed as they may still be useful for other versions of python. These checks will probably end up being performed by pants, so maybe not such a big deal to remove them.

[guzzijones]

Give this error a look please: unit test error

[AndroxxTraxxon]

@guzzijones
Those tests failed with a warning about some race conditions being possible:

st2.st2common.services.coordination: WARNING: Coordination backend is not configured. Code paths which use coordination service will use best effort approach and race conditions are possible.

I'm not entirely sure what causes this, but I don't think this change caused those failures. You can see that these tests are the same tests that were cancelled in the last merge to master

You can see in this job run where I effectively changed nothing (just trailing space stuff to meet linting rules), but the test passed. This doesn't surprise me given the warning that comes with the error.

[AndroxxTraxxon]

Overall the change looks good to me. I do wonder if the pip checks should disabled rather than completely removed as they may still be useful for other versions of python. These checks will probably end up being performed by pants, so maybe not such a big deal to remove them.

The comparison was being done to ensure an appropriate version of pip was being used in the installation, but in the Makefile, we pin that pip version to 20.3.3 during the installation, which is well past the 6.0.0 minimum that was being enforced. If these kinds of checks are going to additionally be performed by the pants system, this is all the more reason to remove it now.

[AndroxxTraxxon]

The last test failure is another race condition for a test that was not modified. You can see in previous commits that it passed just fine

st2.st2common.services.coordination: WARNING: Coordination backend is not configured. Code paths which use coordination service will use best effort approach and race conditions are possible.

[arm4b]

Thanks, very helpful in the context of difficulties with the StackStorm's Python versions support StackStorm/community#103

I guess @cognifloyd 👀 you might be interested to take look too, as it's build/packaging related.

[arm4b]

Just for reference: https://bugs.python.org/issue41282#msg393018 how it's a replacement for distutil.sysconfig.get_python_lib.

[guzzijones]

The last test failure is another race condition for a test that was not modified. You can see in previous commits that it passed just fine

st2.st2common.services.coordination: WARNING: Coordination backend is not configured. Code paths which use coordination service will use best effort approach and race conditions are possible.

Yes, sadly the unit tests run without the coordinator turned on. A redis container is linked to the unit tests, but it is not used. Also, it looks like some unit tests patch the NoCoordinator. I noticed this on our own fork.

[guzzijones]

looks good to me.