[setup] drop deprecated distutils usage

[XuehaiPan]

What does this PR do?

Migrate setup script to pyproject.toml (PEP 517 – A build-system independent format for source trees).

Changes:

• drop deprecated distutils usage
• migrate setup script to pyproject.toml
• migrate isort and pytest configs to pyproject.toml
• migrate flake8 configs to .flake8 and remove setup.cfg file

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[HuggingFaceDocBuilderDev]

The documentation is not available anymore as the PR was closed or merged.

[sgugger]

Thanks for your PR, but we are very happy with the setup as it is.

[XuehaiPan]

but we are very happy with the setup as it is.

Thanks for the clarification. The pyprojct.toml format is the recommended packaging method in PEP 517 – A build-system independent format for source trees. I have reverted some of the commits but kept the first one. The distutils module is deprecated and will be removed in Python 3.12 (See also PEP 632 – Deprecate distutils module). In this PR, I changed distutils.core.Command to setuptools.Command.

[sgugger]

Thanks for your contribution!

[sgugger]

I think you can suggest the changes thate removed the setup.cfg in a separate PR, it's a good cleanup (but not relevant to this PR anymore)

For migrating the setup.py to the pyproject, let's see with @LysandreJik what he thinks. My first reaction is to keep what's been working for us all these years ;-)

[XuehaiPan]

Thanks for the clarification. Since we have already dropped Python 3.6 support, setuptools works very well with pyproject.toml based project. We can move the static parts in setup.py to pyproject.toml. Note that the optional dependencies are too dynamic, so we still need a setup.py file.

Most Python utilities support pyproject.toml configuration (black, isort, ruff, pytest, ...). And some do not even support other config files like setup.cfg (e.g., black). I think maintaining configurations in a single file is a good practice. If you decide to migrate to pyproject.toml, pin me if I can help.

[sgugger]

Yes, moving all configurations to the pyproject.toml is something we would like to clean up. If you want to contribute it, please open a PR :-) Note that we kept the isort and flake8 configurations for a bit after our migration to ruff, but they can now be completely removed, so it would just be pytest if I'm not mistaken.