namlook/mongokit — pull request #66 by pawciobiel (2011-11-15 00:02:38+00:00)
Title: "nightly build install" for setuptools

I have not seen the whole history of this issue as the repo has been removed
from bitbucket so please forgive if my answer is far from what you need.

I think there are at least two solutions to the problem:
A) We could add link href to https://github.com/namlook/mongokit/tarball/master#egg=mongokit-dev
in the long_description and set tag_build=dev in setup.cfg as default. Hence this pull request.
BTW: It looks like PyPi PIP project uses that approach.

From the setuptools docs:
http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/setuptools#making-your-package-available-for-easyinstall
http://packages.python.org/distribute/setuptools.html#dependencies-that-aren-t-in-pypi

long_description
EasyInstall will check any URLs contained in this argument to see if they are primary links.

A URL is considered a "primary link" if it is a link to a .tar.gz, .tgz, .zip,
.egg, .egg.zip, .tar.bz2, or .exe file, or if it has an #egg=project or
#egg=project-version fragment identifier attached to it. EasyInstall attempts
to determine a project name and optional version number from the text of
a primary link without downloading it. When it has found all the primary links,
EasyInstall will select the best match based on requested version,
platform compatibility, and other criteria.

B) You as the maintainer could register and upload both version.
First upload dev version, with sth like this:

python setup.py egg_info --tag-date --tag-build "dev" --no-svn-revision sdist bdist_egg register upload

and then production release, eg:
python setup.py egg_info -RDb "" sdist bdist_egg register upload

That way production release will be marked the default one by pypi.

Distutils docs says that by default PyPI will list all versions of a given package.
To hide certain versions, the Hidden property should be set to yes. This must be edited through the web interface.
http://docs.python.org/distutils/packageindex.html

but in CheeseShopTutorial http://wiki.python.org/moin/CheeseShopTutorial#Exposing_Multiple_Releases
you can find that:
When a new release of a package is submitted to the Package Index,
all previous releases of that package are hidden from the display.

Exposing Multiple Releases

When a new release of a package is submitted to the Package Index,
all previous releases of that package are hidden from the display.
This means that listings and searches will no longer find those releases.

You may use the package admin interface to un-hide releases.
This may be useful if you have both a stable and a development
release active at the same time. These will be hidden again on the
next submission of meta-data.

It's also worth to have a look at:
http://packages.python.org/distribute/setuptools.html#specifying-your-project-s-version