DeprecationWarning: distutils Version classes are deprecated. Use packaging.version instead.

[FrancescoCasalegno]

Description

setuptools has deprecated the usage of distutils Version classes since version 60.3.0. See https://github.com/pypa/setuptools/commit/1701579e0827317d8888c2254a17b5786b6b5246 for details.

As a consequence, a warning is raised any time we try, e.g., to do from docker import from_env. Notice that this warning can be fatal if the user has set a warning filter to error mode, which is not too uncommon when running unit tests in CI.

Error Message

/opt/hostedtoolcache/Python/3.7.12/x64/lib/python3.7/site-packages/mxnet/__init__.py:104: in <module>
    from . import numpy_dispatch_protocol
/opt/hostedtoolcache/Python/3.7.12/x64/lib/python3.7/site-packages/mxnet/numpy_dispatch_protocol.py:193: in <module>
    @with_array_function_protocol
/opt/hostedtoolcache/Python/3.7.12/x64/lib/python3.7/site-packages/mxnet/numpy_dispatch_protocol.py:48: in with_array_function_protocol
    cur_np_ver = LooseVersion(_np.__version__)
/opt/hostedtoolcache/Python/3.7.12/x64/lib/python3.7/site-packages/setuptools/_distutils/version.py:57: in __init__
    stacklevel=2,
E   DeprecationWarning: distutils Version classes are deprecated. Use packaging.version instead.

To Reproduce

import warnings
warnings.filterwarnings("error")

import mxnet as mx

What have you tried to solve it?

To fix the problem we should replace occurrences of distutils.Version (and its subclasses) with packaging.Version.

There are only few cases where intervention is needed, see full list here.

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