released mainly due to otherwise crashing upon exit using musl. i don't much care for how musl is implementing thread cancellation and cleanup, but it's arguably standards-compliant, and not my project to lead. this is particularly important for alpine.
the octant blitter (NCBLIT_4x2) has been added thanks to Unicode 16, @eschnett, and myself. no terminals are currently marked as supporting octants, so it'll never actually be used, but expect this situation to change soon. octants give you two colums of four rows each per character cell, and thus better resolution than sextants or quadrants. like NCBLIT_2x1 (and no other semigraphic blitters), it preserves aspect ratio, and can thus be used with NCBLIT_SCALE. the downside is that a cell now must represent eight pixels, which could contain up to eight different colors, while we only get two. there will thus be some loss in fidelity for anything other than bicolored sets of eight pixels. for images which only use two colors (e.g. simple text), this blitter is a big win.
a bug was fixed when drawing QR codes, and QR codes now always use NCBLIT_2x1 (so that aspect ratio is always preserved). this means they are unavailable in a pure ASCII environment, which lacks top and bottom halves. thanks @RMZeroFour !
handles Python 3.12's removal of distutils from the standard library.
fixes a bug when using ncmetric without UTF8 support. unlikely to hit anyone in real life, but plausible when running the unit tests in automated environments.
