rospy and Tkinter - spin() and mainloop()

edit

I want to write a rospy node that uses Python's GUI toolkit Tkinter, problem is that rospy.spin() and top.mainloop() are both blocking calls.

I thought of starting one and setting an interrupt to start the other, like:

top.after(50, rospy.spin )
top.mainloop()

This successfully starts both loops, but once rospy.spin() starts it completely takes control from Tkinter (until I hit ctrl+c, then Tkinter resumes). What I really want is a rospy.spinOnce() that I can call on Tkinter's repaint cycle, but I gather there isn't such a thing.

Is there a good way to have both top.mainloop() and rospy.spin() running in the same thread? Or at least a work-a-round?

Edit: I found a work-a-round by forking rospy.spin() into it's own thread and protecting all my variables inside the ros callbacks with mutexes like so:

from threading import Thread, Lock

mutex = Lock()

def rosClbk(data) :
    mutex.aquire()
    _var = var
    mutex.release()
    # do processing on _var

def main() :
    ...
    t = Thread(target = rospy.spin )
    t.start()
    top.mainloop()

This makes the program a bit hard to kill (since ros no longer responds to ctrl+c), but otherwise seems to work fine. Is this too dirty? Is there a better way?