setuptools install_requires quirk

It’s interesting that having “dev” version packages in the install_requires list will fail.
Say for example, if you do:

from setuptools import setup
setup(
…
install_requires=["Pylons==dev"],
…
)

It won’t work:

Installed d:\python25\lib\site-packages\pylons-0.9.7rc3dev_20081103-py2.5.egg
Reading http://www.pylonshq.com/download/0.9.7
error: Could not find required distribution Pylons==dev

I imagine it would match if the package would literally have the version “dev”.
One solution is to change the install_requires to ["Pylons==dev,!=foo"] or some other [...]

setuptools + nosetests oddness

Looks like using setuptools’s test runner (eg, run python setup.py test) with the nose.collector has some weird issues – well, unexpected, for me at least.
I was using nose with coverage via –with-coverage option to get some cover reports. But setup.py test borked with “setup.py: error: no such option: –cover-package”. After some digging in the sources [...]