> I'd rather not have resources outside the local machine be accessed.

Fair enough.

> If you *also* want a way to skip tests based on resource when running 
> them outside regrtest, then unittest would have to grow a resource API.

This can already be done though -- adding a resource API to unittest would just provide an additional way to do it without going through regrtest.

I don't think we will ever get rid of regrtest.  It would be nice if most of the code could be removed and standard unittest features were used instead, but regrtest will always have more advanced/customized feature built on top of unittest (which is not to say that a resource API for unittest is useless, but that's not a blocker for this issue :).