Remove uses of 'distutils'

[sommerlukas]

The distutils package has been deprecated in Python 3.10 and removed in 3.12 (https://peps.python.org/pep-0632/).

Python 3.12 is the default version on Ubuntu 24.04, which many BMG users will be using as their OS.

The remaining uses of distutils in the project should therefore be removed.

[anmyachev]

distutils library has indeed been removed from the standard libraries in Python, however, setuptools library still provides access to it. Since setuptools is a mandatory library for Triton, there should be no problems. How did you discover this? Did your build not work?

[sommerlukas]

@Ruyk had some issues when building with Python 3.12, more specifically when installing the benchmarks:

intel-xpu-backend-for-triton/benchmarks$ python3 setup.py install
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "intel-xpu-backend-for-triton/benchmarks/setup.py", line 8, in <module>
from distutils import log # pylint: disable=[deprecated-module]
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'distutils'

setuptools was installed in his (active) virtual environment.

[anmyachev]

setuptools was installed in his (active) virtual environment.

Seems like too old setuptools. What version of the library is in the environment?

UPD: It might also be a good idea to check that python3 points to python from the virtual environment.

[sommerlukas]

I tried reproducing the error in a build with Python 3.12, but in my case installing the benchmark worked, probably using the distutils from setuptools.

So, the immediate issue was potentially related to environment problems.

@anmyachev @vlad-penkin Do we still want to keep this ticket to remove the deprecated package in our project?

[anmyachev]

@anmyachev @vlad-penkin Do we still want to keep this ticket to remove the deprecated package in our project?

I guess we can wait until Triton itself does this. This way we won't increase the difference from Triton, which complicates synchronization.