Not so much an omission as no one has shown a need yet and we prefer to only add support for things people have demonstrable need for instead of guessing. E.g. f the wheel project told us they could use such a thing, though, we would consider adding it.

Also other PEP 517 backend authors since they would have need for it.

I have somewhat of a need for it in my project, so I can PR this if you're willing to accept it.

@MrMino can I ask why it's only "somewhat"? If you have an actual need then we will totally look at a PR, but I would rather avoid speculative code.

Isn't it going to be just "-".join(...) + extension?

Does this really need to be a function here?

@brettcannon Well, I'm doing it inside wheelfile. It isn't a big deal at all, I just feel like it would be elegant to have it. I haven't utilized parse_wheel_filename there yet, but I'm planning on doing it.

@pradyunsg technically parse_wheel_filename returns Version and a set of tags, so you have to cast it properly, then there's also the kink in handling the build number.

It's a little more complicated than that due to tag sets. If we added a function to construct that part of the wheel file name then you might as well just skip having that as a separate function (since I don't think it would be that useful on its own) and go as far as constructing the wheel file name entirely.

As an example, this is untested code written for Python 3.9:

import operator

def _compress_wheel_tags(tags: AbstractSet[Tag], attr: str) -> str:
    tag_portions = []
    for attr in "interpreter", "abi", "platform":
        parts = map(operator.attrgetter(attr), tags)
        compressed = ".".join(sorted(parts))
        tag_portions.append(compressed)
    return "-".join(tag_portions)


def create_wheel_filename(project: NormalizedName, version: Version, build: BuildTag | None, tags: AbstractSet[Tag]) -> str:
    compressed_tag = _compress_wheel_tags(tags)
    if build:
        parts = project, version, build, compressed_tag
    else:
        parts = project, version, compressed_tag
    return "-".join(map(str, parts)) + ".whl"

If I were to ask for such a function (I am not), I would want name and version normalisation, ensuring components don’t contain -, things like that.

@MrMino fair enough! If you would use it if we provided it then I'm okay with adding the function.

@uranusjr I would flat-out dictate via typing that stuff had to be normalized. But I'm also okay forcibly normalizing if people would rather do that.

FYI there is a PR for this, but I think we need to resolve PEP 625 first.

FYI https://peps.python.org/pep-0625/ has been accepted!

I've resoled the merge conflicts in the PR.