Feature or enhancement

distutils is deprecated and is scheduled to be removed from Python 3.12. PyPA setuptools replaces distutils and provides shims for distutils package.

GH-90005 tracks effort to use configure.ac, Makefile, and makesetup to build almost all shared extensions without distutils. Only a handful of modules have not been ported yet

• _curses
• _curses_panel
• _ctypes, see gh-90005: Port _ctypes to PY_STDLIB_MOD #32229
• _dbm
• readline