Project not compatible with Python 3.12

[volkertb]

There are multiple breaking changes in Python 3.12 that are preventing this project from installing properly:

First one is this error:

ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'distutils'

A workaround for this it to install the module setuptools.

Installing requirements.txt yields yet another error (I forgot which one), which is subsequently resolved by bumping up numpy to version 2.0.0. But then, when trying to install the modules in requirements.txt once more, another error is thrown:

...
        File "/tmp/pip-install-ch6d8th7/matplotlib_9bc770f3d2234c93bf58f0478f68252b/versioneer.py", line 401, in get_config_from_root
          parser = configparser.SafeConfigParser()
                   ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
      AttributeError: module 'configparser' has no attribute 'SafeConfigParser'. Did you mean: 'RawConfigParser'?