Docs/Dependencies: lerna subdependency incompatible with macOS Python3.12

[kadamwhite]

When trying to run yarn to set up the repo for contribution, I found that the install failed because a (Python) dependency package distutils was missing when trying to build the binary for node-gyp, one of the project's build dependencies.

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/Users/kadam/gh/vega/vega/node_modules/node-gyp/gyp/gyp_main.py", line 42, in <module>
    import gyp  # noqa: E402
    ^^^^^^^^^^
  File "/Users/kadam/gh/vega/vega/node_modules/node-gyp/gyp/pylib/gyp/__init__.py", line 9, in <module>
    import gyp.input
  File "/Users/kadam/gh/vega/vega/node_modules/node-gyp/gyp/pylib/gyp/input.py", line 19, in <module>
    from distutils.version import StrictVersion
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'distutils'

I found that running,

python3 -m pip install setuptools

resolved the issue — distutils was deprecated and removed in Python 3.12, but still seems to be needed by this version of node-gyp in order for the Vega repo dependencies to install with yarn.

node-gyp is included in the project as a subdependency of lerna:

npm ls node-gyp
vega@ /Users/kadam/gh/vega/vega
└─┬ lerna@7.4.2
  └─┬ @npmcli/run-script@6.0.2
    └── node-gyp@9.4.1

I'd suggest either adding a note to the contributing.md with this gotcha, or evaluating an upgrade to lerna v8. node-gyp has resolved the issue internally and I believe lerna 8 has incorporated the updated version.

[sm-thirdman]

Hi @kadamwhite,
Thanks for resolving this issue, as this got me past this point.

However at top level or in the vega-cli package it will now not install/complie/whatever canvas.

If I go into the node-packages/canvas and yarn install, it completes, although with plenty or warnings.

But dependent packages, such as vega-cli, will not build. It seems to think canvas hasn't been built, tries to download it, can't then tries to build it again.

Then I get errors like:

gyp info spawn args [ 'BUILDTYPE=Release', '-C', 'build' ]
  SOLINK_MODULE(target) Release/canvas-postbuild.node
  CXX(target) Release/obj.target/canvas/src/backend/Backend.o
In file included from ../src/backend/Backend.cc:1:
In file included from ../src/backend/Backend.h:6:
../../nan/nan.h:2546:8: error: no matching member function for call to 'SetAccessor'
  tpl->SetAccessor(
  ~~~~~^~~~~~~~~~~
/Users/N/Library/Caches/node-gyp/22.2.0/include/node/v8-template.h:1055:8: note: candidate function not viable: no known conversion from 'v8::AccessControl' to 'v8::PropertyAttribute' for 5th argument
  void SetAccessor(
       ^
/Users/N/Library/Caches/node-gyp/22.2.0/include/node/v8-template.h:1049:8: note: candidate function not viable: no known conversion from 'imp::NativeGetter' (aka 'void (*)(v8::Local<v8::Name>, const v8::PropertyCallbackInfo<v8::Value> &)') to 'v8::AccessorGetterCallback' (aka 'void (*)(Local<v8::String>, const PropertyCallbackInfo<v8::Value> &)') for 2nd argument

Also macOS, Python 3.12

Have you seen this and got past it?