Hi David and Christoph,
> This is actually a bug/typo in older versions of meson. What is actually
> required (in some cases) is python3-distutils.
I found [this issue][1] on GitHub repo for meson which indicates that
meson 0.48.0 added a dependency on python's setuptools module. This
issue is quite old but it was referenced by a [newer pull request][2]
that seems to indicate that at some point meson depended on python's
distutils module. This PR was referenced by an even [newer PR][3] that
seems to indicate that meson moved away from using the distutils module.
This is probably why this is only an issue in bullseye or focal and not
older or newer dists.
> It's a bit of a mess, but looks like we need to install
> python3-distutils just for bullseye and focal as a build dependency. Is
> that possible?
Adding python3-distutils for just bullseye and focal should be doable. I
believe the scripts used to build the packages for the PGDG apt repo has
an existing pattern for tweaking the package. Attached is a patch that
should add python3-distutils to pgbackrest's list of build dependencies
only on bullseye or focal.
--Bradford
[1]: https://github.com/mesonbuild/meson/issues/4267
[2]: https://github.com/mesonbuild/meson/pull/9288
[3]: https://github.com/mesonbuild/meson/pull/11133
