Problems during installation of pysparse under Python 3.8.10

Question

I downloaded pysparse's tarball (pysparse-1.1.1.tar.gz), decompressed the files into a folder as usual and tried to install the package using the well-known procedure:

sudo python3 setup.py install

but I get the following errors:

setup.py:68: DeprecationWarning: distutils Version classes are deprecated. Use packaging.version instead.
  current = version.StrictVersion(pyver)  # Object that can be compored
setup.py:69: DeprecationWarning: distutils Version classes are deprecated. Use packaging.version instead.
  target = version.StrictVersion('2.6')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "setup.py", line 357, in <module>
    execfile(os.path.join('Lib', '__version__.py'))
NameError: name 'execfile' is not defined

On the other hand, sudo python3 -m pip install pysparse outputs even more garbage.

Makes me wonder whether pysparse is compatible with Python 3.8.10, which is the version I'm currently using.

Thanks for any enlightenment.