distutils was removed in Python 3.12 which makes build/ninja/msvc.py fail. Possible solutions:

1. Require setuptools as a dependency, which provides distutils
2. Vendor (the relevant bits of) distutils or setuptools
3. Use packaging.Version instead of distutils.version.StrictVersion

packaging.Version does not do "strict" version checking, but that can be implemented in a lightweight way via regex (if needed at all, but I have doubts about the usefulness of that). Would you be interested in a PR that implements this 3rd option?