Hi, @itzwam ,

I think you're mismatching informations here. Let me try to clarify and tell me if I'm wrong.

First of I believe the issue in #278 with the current code base should not be possible as we're getting strtobool from setuptools and not directly from distutils (which is deprecated and removed from 3.12).

I did miss the recommendation of reimplementing strtobool for this use case so I'm not invalidating your point, but, what I understand is that, setuptools includes its own version of distutils in its package and the import you're seeing is an import of their own version made possible through a hack.

• https://github.com/pypa/setuptools/tree/2384d915088b960999ca74fb81ce70bffd17b082/_distutils_hack
• https://github.com/pypa/setuptools/tree/2384d915088b960999ca74fb81ce70bffd17b082/_distutils_hack

I do not know what the setuptools devs will do but I did try the 2nd release candidate of 3.12.0 and installed setuptools with pip. The current import seems to work fine for now.

If we wish to replace this import to follow the pep advice, I would recommend to just copy/paste the actual source code into our own utils module:

def strtobool(val):
    """Convert a string representation of truth to true (1) or false (0).

    True values are 'y', 'yes', 't', 'true', 'on', and '1'; false values
    are 'n', 'no', 'f', 'false', 'off', and '0'.  Raises ValueError if
    'val' is anything else.
    """
    val = val.lower()
    if val in ('y', 'yes', 't', 'true', 'on', '1'):
        return 1
    elif val in ('n', 'no', 'f', 'false', 'off', '0'):
        return 0
    else:
        raise ValueError("invalid truth value {!r}".format(val))

Side-note:

• see the changelog: https://docs.python.org/dev/whatsnew/3.12.html
  PEP 632: Remove the distutils package. See the migration guide for advice replacing the APIs it provided. The third-party Setuptools package continues to provide distutils, if you still require it in Python 3.12 and beyond.