It is not clear how you are meant to use unittest.FunctionTestCase with automatic test running. Unless a simple way to do this already exists, I wonder if it would be okay to automatically discover and run predefined test instances, such as the "test_module.testcase" object in my example module.

Currently the “testcase” object is ignored by the automatic test discovery. Also, attempting to manually run it results in

$ python -m unittest test_module.testcase
[. . .]
TypeError: calling unittest.case.FunctionTestCase (testSomething) returned returned <unittest.result.TestResult run=1 errors=1 failures=0>, not a test

Apparently calling a TestCase instance invokes TestCase.run()!

The only way I can think of making such a test discoverable is my making a subclass. But as demonstrated by my example module, this is more cumbersome than bypassing FunctionTestCase altogether.

According to the docs, there's no reason to use FunctionTestCase unless you are dealing with legacy test code (eg: importing it from some existing module), so yes your "this seems easier" is certainly easier :)

(I wasn't even aware FunctionTestCase existed.)

I'm not sure what the issues would be with making them discoverable.  We'll wee what Robert and/or Michael have to say.