macos-latest-xlarge suddenly missing distutils

[nkallen]

Describe the bug

distutils is used by node-gyp . It was previously installed on macOS-latest-xlarge but is suddenly missing.

I tried both

              sudo -H pip install setuptools

and

              pip install setuptools 

but I continue to get errors like

Traceback (most recent call last):
91
File "/Users/runner/hostedtoolcache/node/17.5.0/arm64/lib/node_modules/npm/node_modules/node-gyp/gyp/gyp_main.py", line 42, in
92
import gyp # noqa: E402
93
^^^^^^^^^^
94
File "/Users/runner/hostedtoolcache/node/17.5.0/arm64/lib/node_modules/npm/node_modules/node-gyp/gyp/pylib/gyp/init.py", line 9, in
95
import gyp.input
96
File "/Users/runner/hostedtoolcache/node/17.5.0/arm64/lib/node_modules/npm/node_modules/node-gyp/gyp/pylib/gyp/input.py", line 19, in
97
from distutils.version import StrictVersion
98
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'distutils'
99