that neither pip nor the setuptools backend should not change the tags it applies to wheels by default).
I'm a bit confused -- are we talking about the backwards compatible path to the future -- or the end-game? In short -- I'm sure we'll have to do some hacky stuff to keep backwards compatibility, but the end game should be a clean separation of concerns : Pip (or any front end) should never "build a wheel", and it certainly shouldn't have to know enough about what's in a wheel to be re-naming it for generic python vs cpython. The package manager should manage the package, not built it, or change it. Surely the build system should know how to correctly name the wheel it builds. As to using pip to build wheels -- there is good reason to do that now, but in s post PEP 517 world, one would call the build system directly to build a wheel-- after all, all pip should be doing is calling the build system anyway. -CHB