dist_utils is depricated

[jedwards4b]

In utils.py and perhaps in other places we have:

# pylint: disable=deprecated-module                                                                                                                                        
from distutils import file_util                     

marking the routine as deprecated means it won't fail the pylint test - but it is completly removed in the latest python 3.12. We need to replace all occurances of distutils in cime.

[github-actions]

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[mnlevy1981]

It looks like the file_util imports have been removed, but several modules have

from distutils.spawn import find_executable

shutils.which provides the same functionality:

>>> from distutils.spawn import find_executable
>>> from shutil import which
>>> find_executable('xmllint')
<stdin>:1: DeprecationWarning: Use shutil.which instead of find_executable
'/Users/mlevy/miniconda3/envs/cupid-dev/bin/xmllint'
>>> which('xmllint')
'/Users/mlevy/miniconda3/envs/cupid-dev/bin/xmllint'

(both return None when file is not found)