assertions in setUp are fine IMO. But here's the thing. WHat should this code do?

class Demo(unittest.TestCase):

    def setUp(self):
        raise Exception('hi')

    def test_normal(self):
        # this should NOT be covered by expectedFailure
        pass

    @unittest.expectedFailure
    def test_expected_fail(self):
        pass

This will fail today because the decorator doesn't affect setUp.

If we apply a patch to change this, it will fail because test_normal doesn't apply the decorator.

I can imagine with dependency injection that one could set this up and have it genuinely configured correctly: but if one is doing that I'd expect the dimension of variance to be per scenario, not per test method. So it still wouldn't make sense to me.

@nick - yes, thats exactly right, this is at most docs IMO.