Implement strtobool?

[jvanderaa]

Environment

• netutils version:

Proposed Functionality

Would look to reimplement the distutils strtobool function.

Use Case

The taking a string and getting a boolean from it is helpful. Could be used in YAML manipulation (yes/no), or for reading from environment settings.

The distutils library that has the implementation is being retired and has deprecation warnings in it as of Python3.10. It would be nice to have a place to be able to get the same functionality from a trusted utility source. Understand if this is something that should not be here. Their advice is for each individual to implement their own.

Seeing this as an example:

_MAP = {
    "y": True,
    "yes": True,
    "t": True,
    "true": True,
    "on": True,
    "1": True,
    "n": False,
    "no": False,
    "f": False,
    "false": False,
    "off": False,
    "0": False,
}


def strtobool(value):
    try:
        return _MAP[str(value).lower()]
    except KeyError:
        raise ValueError('"{}" is not a valid bool value'.format(value))

[glennmatthews]

distutils is removed in Python 3.12 so this issue is blocking Python 3.12 compatibility of the included tasks.py.

Additionally, need to remove the dependency in netutils/os_version.py on distutils.version.LooseVersion for the same reason.