Oh well. While it is undoubtedly useful I wish we had had more experience and factored the API differently. Ditto for the maxsize=N feature.

So, while it's not too late, perhaps we should indeed follow Antoine's advice and implement a different queue that has fewer features but is guaranteed to be usable by signal handlers and GC callbacks (including __del__). The nice part here is that a queue is mostly a wrapper around a deque anyways, and deque itself is reentrant. (At least one would hope so -- Antoine's patch to Queue assumes this too, and I can't think of a reason why deque would need to release the GIL.)