The deactivate/activate are very RHEL-centric (understood that that is what Riot is using, but Netflix is planning to be able to support debian/Ubuntu as well).  My Python is not strong, but it would be fantastic if we could use this same provisioner for RHEL or debian-like hosts (pass a function as an arg that is the activate/deactivate?).  This is another reason I was leaning toward a native package delivering the chef recipes and executing chef in post.  The provisioners, as currently designed has to know about the platform it's executing on so that it can do the right bind mounts, chroot actions, etc.  This as designed currently would need to duplicate every platform's logic