How to know if threading.Condition.wait(timeout) has timed out or has been notified?

The easy way to do this is to use Python 3.2 or later, or get the backport of the current threading to 3.1/2.7/etc. from PyPI, or just copy the code for that method from, say, 3.4's source.

As the docs for Condition.wait explain:

The return value is True unless a given timeout expired, in which case it is False.

Changed in version 3.2: Previously, the method always returned None.

As a side note, I'm not sure you need a Condition here at all; you're not checking a flag inside the loop, or doing anything else that should be susceptible to a race condition, you're just waiting to be notified. That implies that, as long as you don't need magic auto-reset, an Event should be just fine. And Event.wait has had the True/False return since 2.7/3.1+, rather than 3.2+.

After all it was very simple, I was just focusing on the wrong thing: I just needed a sleep that could be stopped with an event and thats what Event.wait(t) does. The problem then, can be solved just with Events.

import threading
import time

def sample_thread(stop_ev):
    while not stop_ev.is_set():
        print 'Thread iteration'
        stop_ev.wait(0.1)

def main():
    stop_ev = threading.Event()
    sample_t = threading.Thread(target=sample_thread, args=(stop_ev, ))
    sample_t.start()

    # Other stuff here, sleep is just dummy
    time.sleep(14)

    stop_ev.set()

    print 'End reached.'

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()