setuptools version

setuptools==69.0.0

Python version

3.12

OS

Ubuntu

Additional environment information

No response

Description

About 15h ago, Astropy's CI started failing to build with

ImportError: cannot import name 'newer_group' from 'setuptools.dep_util'

This seems to correspond to an intentional change in setuptools 69.
Nonetheless, from reading the PR that introduced the change (#4069), I'm not sure that this was supposed to break immediately. Was this intended ?

Expected behavior

a deprecation warning instead of a hard error ?

How to Reproduce

$ python -c "from setuptools.dep_util import newer_group"

Output

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
ImportError: cannot import name 'newer_group' from 'setuptools.dep_util' (/private/tmp/venv/lib/python3.12/site-packages/setuptools/dep_util.py)