Right now distutils.version.StrictVersion is used for the version check. Maybe packaging.version is better (vendored by setuptools too), but I think this would mean packaging should be added to the requirements.

Several places in the library do something like:

tuple(map(int, cp.__version__.split("."))) < (10, 0)

That is another possibility if preferred.

I would avoid using distutils as it is being removed in Python 3.12. In testing code paths, you can use the packaging library as that is a dependency of pytest but for runtime code, we should probably stick to what @pijyoi suggested above (although I'm certainly open to other suggestions).

I have updated the implementation.

Hi @koenstrien

I hope you don't mind, I pushed a commit to your branch removing the import. The reason I did it is I'm about to leave for a vacation for a little over a week, and I wanted to do a new release before I left. I wanted this PR to be in the new release which I'm about to get the ball rolling on.

Thanks for the PR!

EDIT: whops, I just realized that I never actually submitted the notification to you asking to remove the import, my fault! (I was on mobile, meant to leave a comment on a line, guess it started a review, and when I hit done, it thought I was done w/ the comment but not the review).