So while I was working on pip, I noticed a parameter called 'autobuilding' in wheel.py. What this does (I think) is that if pip decides that it needs to be enabled (which is an implementation detail not relevant here), it adds the following to the "setup.py bdist_wheel" call:
["--python-tag", python_tag]
This switches the output of the bdist_wheel filename to include something like "cp36" rather than "py36," which indicates the Python implementation. The question is this: this behavior isn't captured (I think) in the build_wheel function, possibly (probably) for good reason. So that means once everything goes through the PEP 517 protocol, pip will not be able to let setuptools know about this information. Which means that we need to decide:
Should the PEP 517 backend for setuptools assume "cp36" in python_tag
OR
Should the PEP 517 backend for setuptools assume "py36" in python_tag