It's trivial to add to a single test or even a single TestCase subclass, yes. The use case is more that you have a ton of tests and you suspect there's a problem due to GC. Being able to call gc.collect() after each test through the flip of a flag would be useful.

But I agree it's iffy whether this belongs in the unittest package; we could add it to the CPython run_tests.py script, or you could request this as a feature from py.test.

If someone wants to add this to run_tests.py I think this issue would be the place to review the patch.