The mutex class (and module) should not be used, since it is, as you said, deprecated for 3.0. Like the docs say, it "does not require (or imply) threading or multi-tasking, though it could be useful for those purposes." The mutex class' lock() method takes a function and args and if the mutex is unlocked, calls the function with args immediately, or if locked, adds to a queue and waits for it to be unlocked
The threading.Lock object is a lock shared between threads. For example, if you have two threads (thread1 and thread2) and thread1 does lock.acquire() and thread 2 calls lock.acquire(), thread2 will block until thread1 calls lock.release(), then thread2 will get a chance to run its critical code section, then call lock.release(). - zeph -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
