Audacity does not supply installation packages either for builds at release time, or for builds from HEAD between releases. Any such packages are supplied by your distribution.
Also please note there are no “stable” or “beta” designations for Audacity releases any longer. The releases are what most users should obtain and will always aspire to have qualities associated with a “stable”, mainstream release. Builds between releases are alpha, and could at times be very “unstable” if they contain experimental features.
If you are on Ubuntu and install the “2.0.1+svn20120701+r7240-0” PPA from https://launchpad.net/~audacity-team/+archive/daily, it should be identical from a functional code perspective to 2.0.1 release. Nothing has changed yet, except possibly “About Audacity” might say 2.0.2-alpha.
Yes it does, but what you can do is to temporarily comment out (or otherwise disable) the PPA from your sources list until such time as there is a new release version, then re-enable it to update to the new release (or first, post release alpha).
However, I’ll need to know as soon as a new version of Audacity is released. I discovered this release by accident; how would I normally be notified if I don’t have a current PPA? (The same question would apply if I compiled the source tarball as per your other instructions.)