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+
+Mitogen Compared To
+-------------------
+
+This provides a little free-text summary of conceptual differences between
+Mitogen and other tools, along with some basic perceptual metrics (project
+maturity/age, quality of tests, function matrix)
+
+
+Ansible
+#######
+
+Ansible is a complete provisioning system, Mitogen is a small component of such a system.
+
+You should use Ansible if ...
+
+You should not use Ansible if ...
+
+
+Baker
+#####
+
+http://bitbucket.org/mchaput/baker
+
+
+Chopsticks
+##########
+
+also supports recursion! but the recursively executed instance has no special knowledge of its identity in a tree structure, and little support for functions running in the master to directly invoke functions in a recursive context.. effectively each recursion produces a new master, from which function calls must be made.
+
+executing functions from __main__ entails picking just that function and deps
+out of the main module, not transferring the module intact. that approach works
+but it's much messier than just arranging for __main__ to be imported and
+executed through the import mechanism.
+
+supports sudo but no support for require_tty or typing a sudo password. also supports SSH and Docker.
+
+good set of tests
+
+real PEP-302 module loader, but doesn't try to cope with master also relying on
+a PEP-302 module loader (e.g. py2exe).
+
+unclear which versions of Python are supported, requires at least Python2.6
+(from __future__ import print_function). Unspecified versions of 3 are
+supported.
+
+I/O multiplexer in the master, but not in children.
+
+as with Execnet it includes its own serialization.
+
+design is reminiscent of Mitogen in places (Tunnel is practically identical to
+Mitogen's Stream), and closer to Execnet elsewhere (lack of uniformity,
+tendency to prefer logic expressed in if/else special case soup rather than the
+type system, though some of that is due to supporting Python 3, so not judging
+too harshly!)
+
+You should use Chopsticks if you need Python 3 support.
+
+
+Execnet
+#######
+
+- Parent and children may use threads, gevent, or eventlet, Mitogen only supports threads.
+- No recursion
+- Similar Channel abstraction but better developed.. includes waiting for remote to close its end
+- Heavier emphasis on passing chunks of Python source code around, modules are loaded one-at-a-time with no dependency resolution mechanism
+- Built-in unidirectional rsync-alike, compared to Mitogen's SSH emulation which allows use of real rsync in any supported mode
+- no support for sudo, but supports connecting to vagrant
+- works with read-only filesystem
+- includes its own serialization independent of the standard library, Mitogen uses cPickle.
+
+You should use Execnet if you value code maturity more than featureset.
+
+
+Fabric
+######
+
+allows execution of shell snippets on remote machines, Python functions run
+locally, any remote interaction is fundamentally done via shell, with all the
+limitations that entails. prefers to depend on SSH features (e.g. tunnelling)
+than reinvent them
+
+You should use Fabric if you enjoy being woken at 4am to pages about broken
+shell snippets.
+
+
+Invoke
+######
+
+http://www.pyinvoke.org/
+
+Python 2.6+, 3.3+
+
+Basically a Fabric-alike
+
+
+
+Paver
+#####
+
+https://github.com/paver/paver/
+
+More or less another task execution framework / make-alike, doesn't really deal
+with remote execution at all.
+
+
+Plumbum
+#######
+
+https://pypi.python.org/pypi/plumbum
+
+Shell-only
+
+Basically syntax sugar for running shell commands. Nicer than raw shell
+(depending on your opinions of operating overloading), but it's still shell.
+
+
+Pyro4
+#####
+
+...
+
+
+RPyC
+####
+
+- supports transparent object proxies similar to Pyro (with all the pain and suffering hidden network IO entails)
+- significantly more 'frameworkey' feel
+- runs multiplexer in a thread too?
+- bootstrap over SSH only, no recursion and no sudo
+- requires a writable filesystem
+
+
+
+To Salt
+#######
+
+- no crappy deps
+
+You should use Salt if you enjoy firefighting endless implementation bugs,
+otherwise you should prefer Ansible.
+