pycrtm Installation Error ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'distutils.msvccompiler'

[StegmannJCSDA]

Error Description:

Recently I tried to install pycrtm on Ubuntu 22.04.4 using Python 3.10.12 and encountered the following error:

ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'distutils.msvccompiler'

Attempted Solutions:

The following proposed solutions from here did not fix the problem:

pip3 install setuptools

and

pip3 install --upgrade setuptools

[karpob]

Fairly bizarre, why does it insist on ms visual c++?

[karpob]

Maybe force scikit-build to use something sane using --plat-build ?
https://scikit-build.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

[karpob]

Also maybe, try forcing it to use gcc by setting environment variables CC, CXX, and FC to gcc and gfortran?

[StegmannJCSDA]

It looks like this is because setuptools introduced a breaking change that affects pycrtm.
I found the solution here.
So, downgrading setuptools to version 61 fixed the problem for me:

pip3 install setuptools==61