Right now I’m pretty sure we actually have an implementation defined standard. We’ve tried to keep the PEPs in sync with auditwheel, but in practice we’ve probably missed stuff, and where they’re different it’s auditwheel that’s right, not the PEPs.
With the proposed perennial manylinux, the standard is “if your wheel works on all computers where pip installs it, then it’s compliant”. If someone wants to implement an auditwheel competitor that accomplishes that, then cool. If their wheels meet that standard can’t be uploaded to warehouse because they fail auditwheel’s validation, then that’s a bug in auditwheel’s implementation of the spec and we can fix it.
My extremely vague and unscientific impression is that profile changes are 90% simple and declarative, and 10% quirky stuff that involves code changes. So a tool to dump auditwheel profiles into readable text wouldn’t be 100% accurate, but it could be useful.
It seems like the simplest thing to do would be to have this tool dump text onto some pages on auditwheel.readthedocs.io, updated with every commit? That’s totally doable without bringing in the overhead of pushing PEPs through the review process and then getting pip and warehouse patches through their review processes.