Move away from numpy.distutils

[aragilar]

numpy.distutils is going to go away sometime in the near future (the timeline is unclear, likely due to it being driven by the CPython core devs). scipy seems to be switching to meson, so once they do a release with meson, I'll look at what's needed to convert this over.

[valentinsulzer]

Hi @aragilar , our scikit-odes tests are now failing (see the mentioned issue above), is there any progress with the switch to meson or should we skip the scikit-odes tests for a while?

[aragilar]

I've not seen scipy do a meson release yet, so I haven't done anything about it yet. See #131 for more on the build failure.

[valentinsulzer]

Thanks!

[callegar]

Linux distros have started moving to Python 3.12, including the latest Ubuntu LTS, arch and derivatives, etc. In many of these distro a single linux version (3.12) is provided by the package manager and tricks (pyenv) are required to have other python versions alongside that one. This means that scikits.odes won't provide a nice experience on these distros. Even on the extra flexible anaconda, scikits.odes will end up as the single item preventing an environment to use 3.12.
Because this bug is rather old, I wonder if there might be patches floating around already, enabling the move away from distutils. If so, thanks in case someone can provide a pointer.

[aragilar]

I'd be happy to review something (but I'm probably going to be fairly busy with other things the next few months), but I suspect the main challenge will be getting both f2py and cython working under meson.