Here we replace distutils with pkg_resources as the previous is:

• painfully obsolete,
• removed from python 3.12 onward,
• panics when faced with modern pip package versioning, like 0.37.0rc1.

I opted to use pkg_resources and not packaging because it is pre-installed on the base gobo system.

The available_versions() try-except would always fail as it was calling sort() on a dict_keys object, with a cast to list we can sort it as intended.

In Alien.py we call Alien-NNN and read the results from stdout, however we read it as a byte-array and not as a string, now we decode the byte-array as a "UTF-8" string so that we can properly compare it against the returned list of versions. This may cause issues with other locales, I'm unaware of how to detect the encoding used. I'm open to suggestions.