multiprocessing deadlock

[Brian Quinlan]

My test reduction:

import multiprocessing
import queue

def _process_worker(q):
     while True:
         try:
             something = q.get(block=True, timeout=0.1)
         except queue.Empty:
             return
         else:
             print('Grabbed item from queue:', something)


def _make_some_processes(q):
     processes = []
     for _ in range(10):
         p = multiprocessing.Process(target=_process_worker, args=(q,))
         p.start()
         processes.append(p)
     return processes

def _do(i):
     print('Run:', i)
     q = multiprocessing.Queue()
     for j in range(30):
         q.put(i*30+j)
     processes = _make_some_processes(q)

     while not q.empty():
         pass

#    The deadlock only occurs on Mac OS X and only when these lines
#    are commented out:
#    for p in processes:
#        p.join()

for i in range(100):
     _do(i)

--------------

Output (on Mac OS X using the svn version of py3k):
% ~/bin/python3.2 moprocessmoproblems.py
Run: 0
Grabbed item from queue: 0
Grabbed item from queue: 1
Grabbed item from queue: 2
...
Grabbed item from queue: 29
Run: 1

At this point the script produces no additional output. If I uncomment 
the lines above then the script produces the expected output. I don't 
see any docs that would explain this problem and I don't know what the 
rule would be e.g. you just join every process that uses a queue before 
  the queue is garbage collected.

Any ideas why this is happening?

Cheers,
Brian