[Nick Coghlan]
... (we should probably do something about that misleading ImportError -> TestSkipped -> green buildbot behaviour. . . )
I looked at that briefly a few weeks back and gave up. Seemed the sanest thing was to entirely stop treating ImportError as "test skipped", and rewrite tests that legimately _may_ get skipped to catch expected ImportErrors and change them to TestSkipped themselves. A bit of framework might help; e.g., a test that expects to get skipped due to failing imports on some platforms could define a module-level list bound to a conventional name containing the names of the modules whose import failure should be treated as TestSkipped, and then regrtest.py could be taught to check import errors against the test module's list (if any). In the case du jour, test_functools.py presumably wouldn't define that list, so that any ImportError it raised would be correctly treated as test failure.