[Distutils] Local version identifiers and wheels

[Paul Moore]

PEP 440 allows for local version identifiers, to mark local patches of
a distribution. As this stands, local versions cannot be used in
wheels, because the identifier is delimited with a dash, which clashes
with the separator for the different parts in a wheel filename.

What needs to be done to address this? Should we use a different
delimiter in PEP 440? Or should we specify a translation for the dash
to be used in wheel filenames?

This is directly relevant at the moment, because there is a discussion
on the distlib tracker of an API to allow locally modifying wheels,
and I'm advocating that if this is done, the modified wheel should be
forced to have a local version identifier, to avoid confusion with
"official" versions.

Any thoughts?

Thanks,
Paul