Distutils is deprecated

Development
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distutils has not been included in the Python distribution since version 3.10. However, setup.py still requires distutils to install version 6.0.1. I’m not a Python installation geek, so it’s difficult for me to work around the problem with distutils. I considered installing in a virtual environment. But this type of installation seems like a cop-out to me. Why not make the Gramps installation method PEP 517/518 compliant?

In the meantime, I’ll stick with version 6.0.0 as provided by Kubuntu.

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Can you provide more information what errors did you see, guessing regression related to PR 2027?

Work in progress by the way: 0012369: Migrate from distutils to setuptools until Gramps drops support for older Pythons

Gramps 6.0.x support Python 3.9+ only 6.1.x will support Python 3.10+ only.

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ven avr 18 20:21 $ python3 setup.py build
/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/_distutils_hack/__init__.py:54: UserWarning: Reliance on distutils from stdlib is deprecated. Users must rely on setuptools to provide the distutils module. Avoid importing distutils or import setuptools first, and avoid setting SETUPTOOLS_USE_DISTUTILS=stdlib. Register concerns at https://github.com/pypa/setuptools/issues/new?template=distutils-deprecation.yml
  warnings.warn(
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/pierre/opt/Gramps/gramps-6.0.1/setup.py", line 35, in <module>
    from setuptools import setup, Command
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/setuptools/__init__.py", line 24, in <module>
    from . import logging, monkey
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/setuptools/logging.py", line 5, in <module>
    from . import monkey
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/setuptools/monkey.py", line 13, in <module>
    import distutils.filelist
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'distutils'

I understand that everything is in everything! Once the switch to pip installation is complete, Gramps will be able to “upgrade” to Python 3.10+ and this should happen with version 6.1. But until then, installing via a local build no longer works on Kubuntu 24.10 which uses Python 3.12.7

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See pull request #2053 which converts the build to a pyproject.toml based solution using the Hatchling backend.

It removes the need for distutils/setuptools completely.

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Pip works for installing Gramps 6.0.1 instead of distutils. The flatpak manifest has had to use a pip command for flathub to compile Gramps instead of distutils for a while now because of distutils being dropped from Gnome runtimes several versions ago. I installed Gramps from source on a Fedora 42 VM with pip yesterday while troubleshooting the flatpak, and it worked fine that way. After installing prerequisites like python3-orjson and others, try the commands below from the directory containing setup.py
sudo dnf install python3-pip (edit-I just remembered you were using Kubuntu. Use apt instead of dnf, and check the package name with apt-cache search pip3 IIRC)

pip3 install . <---- (don’t forget the dot at the end of the command)

(Actually I did the bad thing of using sudo pip3 install . because it was a virtual machine for testing and I was frustrated by that time. Sudo pip like I used yesterday is not recommended if you want to keep a system stable.)

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Three days ago (maybe!), the Kubuntu application manager (“Discover”) notified me that version 6.0.1 was available on FlatPack. I was therefore able to update Gramps without having to compile from source.

Thank you for your support.

Pierre

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