Just posted this to comp.lang.python - but posting here as well :-) I've received some great feedback since the initial beta release of the minimalistic STM code I discussed and released 2 weeks ago. I've incorporated the feedback, and created a couple of examples based on the canonical dining philosophers example. (One based on normal python threads, one based on Kamaelia)

It turns out that there was a potential race hazard during "using" and "usevar" which I'd missed - many thanks to Richard Taylor for pointing out this issue.

Changelog
1.0.1

• Improved locking. (fixed race hazards during copying for reading - the last release was noted as probably OK for CPython, but maybe not for Jython or IronPython. This version is more robust)
• Added Dining Philosophers examples (threading & Axon threading)

Getting it
You can download this release version here:

http://thwackety.com/Axon.STM-1.0.1.tar.gz

Installing it

tar zxf Axon.STM-1.0.1.tar.gz
cd Axon.STM-1.0.1/
sudo python setup.py install

What IS it?, Why is it useful?, Docs? Using it?
See website :-)

DIning Philosophers?
See last blog post!

Pure python version in subversion as well.

Thanks for this release
Many thanks go to Richard Taylor for detailed feedback and discussion regarding locking and for pointing me at MASCOT which made me think of doing the dining philosophers this way

Future
This will be merged onto the mainline of Kamaelia with some auxillary functions , as another feather aimed at making concurrency easy to work with :-) Note: For the moment to use this alongside Kamaelia you install this, then reinstall Axon over the top.