ROS1 Noetic and Yocto Scarthgap with Python 3.12

[krisklau]

Describe the bug
Incompatibility with Python 3.12

roscore
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/opt/ros/noetic/bin/roscore", line 37, in <module>
    from roslaunch.nodeprocess import DEFAULT_TIMEOUT_SIGINT, DEFAULT_TIMEOUT_SIGTERM
  File "/opt/ros/noetic/lib/python3.12/site-packages/roslaunch/__init__.py", line 57, in <module>
    from .launch import ROSLaunchRunner
  File "/opt/ros/noetic/lib/python3.12/site-packages/roslaunch/launch.py", line 58, in <module>
    from roslaunch.rlutil import update_terminal_name
  File "/opt/ros/noetic/lib/python3.12/site-packages/roslaunch/rlutil.py", line 47, in <module>
    import rosclean
  File "/opt/ros/noetic/lib/python3.12/site-packages/rosclean/__init__.py", line 40, in <module>
    from distutils.spawn import find_executable
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'distutils'

To Reproduce
Build an image with Ros1 noetic in Scarthgap. This will include python 3.12. This version of python deprecates distutils, which causes problems for some packages. rosclean in the above example. Simply boot the image and run roscore.

Upon patching for distutils, we hit this error as well: ros/ros_comm#2297

Expected behavior
We can patch these package by package, but I am puzzled as to why this has not been reported before. Has the combination of Scarthgap and Noetic been tested?

[krisklau]

Note we will supply patches for the things we encounter, I just wanted to make sure nothing was missing from my configuration.

[poett1]

@krisklau I just started working on ROS Noetic + Scarthgap and did not face this error. However, I had an infinite loop at findCaller() from roslogging.py on every ros command (roscore, rosrun, roslaunch), which could be solved by this comment.
I'm wondering if this is tested at all, since this issue is due to Python 3.12 (which is the default for Scarthgap).