make compile always runs even with no changes

[tahorst]

With #1109, make compile will compile code even if changes haven't been made while this was previously skipped. This can make switching between branches time consuming with our git hook to run wcm-env-check.sh. It looks like the offending line is from distutils.core import setup -> from setuptools import setup. @1fish2, do you know what the difference here would be and why we needed to have this change?

[1fish2]

Good catch.

Apparently distutils has on the way out for years [PEP 632], to be deprecated in Python 3.10 and removed in Python 3.12. (The next few Python releases are planned to have nice performance improvements including a JIT compiler.) setuptools monkey-patches distutils, which presumably explains why some of our setup.py files (like in arrow and vivarium-core) import setuptools without directly using it.

Maybe adjusting how it uses setuptools would fix this? Or maybe we should switch to something like Bento. I didn't want a big investigation. (Flit is recommended as the easiest way to build Python-only packages, but that doesn't apply here.)

Meanwhile, I can revert this change.