I would create my own deque, inheriting from collections.deque. It's not hard. Namely, here it is:
import collections
class deque(collections.deque):
def __init__(self, iterable=(), maxlen=None):
super(deque, self).__init__(iterable, maxlen)
self._maxlen = maxlen
@property
def maxlen(self):
return self._maxlen
and this is the new deque at work:
>>> d = deque()
>>> print d
deque([])
>>> print d.maxlen
None
>>> d = deque(maxlen=3)
>>> print d
deque([], maxlen=3)
>>> print d.maxlen
3
>>> d = deque(range(5))
>>> print d
deque([0, 1, 2, 3, 4])
>>> print d.maxlen
None
>>> d = deque(range(5), maxlen=3)
>>> print d
deque([2, 3, 4], maxlen=3)
>>> print d.maxlen
3