Max Weber famously wrote that politics is “a strong and slow boring of hard boards.” In Why it took 4 years to get a lock files specification, Brett Cannon demonstrates how the same principle applies to technical coordination in open source.
Python recently adopted PEP 751 for lockfile specification. Doing so required an enormous amount of work:
There have been 1,819 posts across 230 topics in the lock files category on discuss.python.org over the past 6 years
This played out over multiple years and had a bunch of ups and downs:
I felt we were extremely close up to that point in reaching an agreement on the PEP, and then having to walk back so much work and features did not exactly make me happy.
But in the end, they got there! I think it’s an amazing example of the slow, methodical, dedicated work that is required to guide groups of people to a shared outcome. This kind of patience is critical and underappreciated in open source. Thanks Brett!