Multiprocessing in a pipeline done right

Question

I\'d like to know how multiprocessing is done right. Assuming I have a list [1,2,3,4,5] generated by function f1 which is written to a Queue

Answer 1

What would be wrong with using idea 1, but with each worker process (f2) putting a custom object with its identifier when it is done? Then f3, would just terminate that worker, until there was no worker process left.

Also, new in Python 3.2 is the concurrent.futures package on the standard library, that should do what you are trying to in the "right way" (tm) - http://docs.python.org/dev/library/concurrent.futures.html

Maybe it is possible to find a backport of concurrent.futures to Python 2.x series.