Also note that the test_support module is for some reason documented here: http://docs.python.org/library/test.html#module-test.test_support
This means that there are probably developers out there that are already using these functions even if some of them are not intended/designed to be used outside the Python test suite.
This situation is sub-optimal for two reasons:
1) test_support can't evolve quickly because the documented functions have to be backward-compatible;
2) other developers are using these python-test-suite-specific functions in their tests;
It would be better to keep test_support for our test suite only and provide/move useful function in unittest.