Why is it needed suddenly?

@cclauss PR LGTM, but I don't think it'll vendor the packaging package into the node-gyp npm package. the pip install --editable . line might also be installing the packaging package already, but pip can detect duplicate installs anyway, and listing out the packaging package seems clearer to me.

@targos node-gyp currently relies on distutils for detecting the Python version. Python 3.10 deprecates that package, and Python 3.12 removes distutils completely. The recommendation is to use the packaging package instead of distutils.version. Because node-gyp hasn't moved away from distutils yet, it is currently unusable on devices running Python 3.12.

Agreed. I will get the vendoring done soon.

I put this in DRAFT because I sense that we will close it with unmerged commits in favor of #214.