Right now, there are ways for package maintainers to test and share draft versions of their upcoming releases, but they cause friction and confusion. So we want to add staged releases -- a temporary state that a release can be in, where PyPI _has_ it and can evaluate it, but hasn't _published_ it yet. In 2015, Nathaniel Smith opened an issue https://github.com/pypa/warehouse/issues/726 saying:
it would be very nice if there where better ergonomics around package uploads -- in particular some way to upload a new release, and then take a look over it to double-check that everything is correct before you -- as a second step -- hit the button to make it "go live".
We have also variously called this idea "unpublished releases", "two-phase upload", "draft releases", and "package preview". This feature will unblock a LOT of stuff we want to do -- see https://wiki.python.org/psf/Fundable%20Packaging%20Improvements#Package_prev... for a list. Alan Velasco is now working on implementing this in Warehouse. Please comment on the GitHub issue or in the Discourse thread at https://discuss.python.org/t/feature-proposal-for-pypi-draft-releases/3903/ where he shares his proposal at length. He notes:
I’ll need your feedback by April 30th 2020 at which point I’ll proceed with the basis of what I know.
(Thread was: Re: [Distutils] PyPi not allowing duplicate filenames https://mail.python.org/archives/list/distutils-sig@python.org/message/S37OQ... ) -- Sumana Harihareswara Changeset Consulting https://changeset.nyc