One thing I really do not like about Rob's last patch is that it exacerbates the documentation discrepancy for loadTestsFromModule().  As previously mentioned, use_load_tests arg was already not documented, and now the patch adds another undocumented pattern default arg.  Undocumented "unofficial" APIs are really a fib - we treat them as official APIs for backward compatibility reasons anyway, so I think it behooves us to document them.

In the same vein, the load_tests Protocol really should tell the truth about its third argument - i.e. it will not always be None.

As Michael suggests in http://bugs.python.org/issue16662#msg200274 I think we should just remove use_load_tests.  We'll still need to document the new pattern=None, unless there's a better way to handle that.