Building zephyr projects fails with python 12

[baschi29]

As mentioned in the title the build fails on a fresh platformio install (trough vscode). I did not save the error message, but the problem was with importing distutils.

The python 12 release notes state:

gh-95299: Do not pre-install setuptools in virtual environments created with venv. This means that distutils, setuptools, pkg_resources, and easy_install will no longer available by default; to access these run pip install setuptools in the activated virtual environment.

Following https://stackoverflow.com/questions/69919970/no-module-named-distutils-util-but-distutils-is-installed I manually added setuptools to the virtual environment which fixed the problem.

I think the solution therefore would probably be to add setuptools accordingly as a dependency in https://github.com/platformio/platformio-core/blob/develop/platformio/dependencies.py for python versions >=12.

I did not include a PR together with this issue yet, as the migration advice as listed under https://peps.python.org/pep-0632/#migration-advice states that for some used modules/types from distutils other modules than setuptools are preferable and I do not have the code insight into this project to judge that.

I did only try building zephyr projects, so maybe this issue belongs to them - again I have not enough insight to judge that.

When I have more time I will try to reproduce the issue again.

[baschi29]

Error occurs in zephyr framework script, I will therefore close this issue. The problem was that the board I used is not supported by more recent zephyr versions.

Error message:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/basti/.platformio/packages/framework-zephyr/scripts/gen_handles.py", line 34, in <module>
    from distutils.version import LooseVersion
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'distutils'```