[jdf]

There's a new project called Ansible that may be of interest to you:

http://ansible.github.com/

While that page has a long list of things they do, the important bits relevant to your comment are

1. a tighter focus on idempotence than Fabric 2. an easy-ish way to integrate package management so you could potentially use the same script to kick off either yum or apt depending on the box

[StavrosK]

Oh God, why do they put hosts in /etc/ansible? Why would I corrupt my system installation with project-specific files? What I want to do is make a "<project>-deployment" folder and have everything related to deployment there.

Why the hell would I store anything about deploying one of my projects in /etc/?

[heretohelp]

The original reason I abandoned chef and puppet is that I didn't like something getting between me and the shell.

Why would I make the same mistake twice? My only real dissatisfaction with Flask is that it cannot handle dispatching its work in parallel. Not a big deal though.

I like knowing exactly how things get done.

[StavrosK]

Doesn't Fabric support parallel instructions now? I think I heard something about that, although I'm not entirely sure...

[ersii]

Yes, yes - it does. If you'd like to read more about it, visit: http://fabric.readthedocs.org/en/1.3.0/usage/parallel.html

[heretohelp]

I was thinking more along the lines of parallel connections.

[StavrosK]

Yeah, it turns out that's what it does, rather than parallel instructions/commands: http://fabric.readthedocs.org/en/1.3.0/usage/parallel.html