These type ignores look like some pretty weird mypy bugginess surrounding LiteralString. I thought probably makes sense to just ignore for now and figure it out later, so we can test 3.12 effectively

Were you using mypy master when you ran tests locally for this PR? This looks like the regression I reported in python/mypy#15161 (comment)

Using mypy 1.3, I don't get any mypy or stubtest errors (on any Python version) if I remove these type: ignores, so I think it is the regression I noted in python/mypy#15161 (comment)

Ah I'd missed that, it's definitely the same thing. Hmm, I'm not sure what the best way to proceed is.

I would have preferred to not do this. I feel like whenever we've used wildcard regex allowlist entries in the past, it's ended up causing us pain and confusion further down the line (#9900; #10205; there have been others as well).

If we have to do this, then we may as well revert the changes that were made to stubtest_stdlib.py in #9734. The venv module is really slow on Windows, so those changes basically doubled the time it takes for me to run the test locally.

I agree in general, but I have basically no further interest in the accuracy of the distutil stubs, especially since most users aren't even going to get distutils when they import distutils. So that points to undo #9734. But I definitely wouldn't say "we have to do this"... let me know which one you want and I'll make the PR.

Yeah, that all makes sense :-) let's go for undoing #9735, then.

Longer term, I guess we might want to look at getting type checkers to somehow recognise that if a user does import distutils with setuptools installed, they'll actually be getting setuptools._distutils... but the idea of adding that kind of special-casing to type checkers really doesn't fill me with joy.....