FTR there is already an alternative to setupmodule:

try:
    import module
except ImportError:
    module = None

@unittest.skipUnless(module, 'requires module')
class ModuleTests(unittest.TestCase):
    pass


This idiom is more lines than support.import_module, but works for non-stdlib tests too, and is useful when you don’t want the whole file to be skipped if the module is missing (like in distutils’ test_sdist where zlib can be missing).