Inter-process locking

[Jason Friedman]

I have a 3rd-party process that runs for about a minute and supports
only a single execution at a time.

$ deploy

If I want to launch a second process I have to wait until the first
finishes.  Having two users wanting to run at the same time might
happen a few times a day.  But, these users will not have the
skills/patience to check whether someone else is currently running.
I'd like my program to be able to detect that "deploy" is already
running, tell the user, wait a minute, try again, repeat.

I do not know whether anyone has had success with
http://pythonhosted.org/lockfile/lockfile.html.

I supose I could use http://code.google.com/p/psutil/ to check for a
process with a particular name.