I've always been cautious about running patch() manually since it was easy to miss the cleanup. But those fears might be irrelevant these days when we have addCleanup().

Still, decorators are a more robust in more complex setups since you don't have to worry about setUp() being properly called in every base class. So I still think this would be interesting.

A different function might be an option to avoid adding arguments. Just like there are a few special patch.*() already.