Terry J. Reedy wrote:
> SkipTest is an exception and according to the doc it should be propagated to the caller.  __unittest_skip__ is an undocumented internal name, so you probably should not be using it.
>
> If this request is not rejected, we will need test code demonstrating the issue *that does not use zope*.

The "skip" I am speaking about is a decorator for tests or test classes telling a "runner" to skip tests (likely because conditions for their success are not met - usually, that required packages are not installed). This "skip" (decorator) uses `__unittest_skip__` to tell the  the "unittest runner" (that is `unittest.TestCase.run`) that the test should be skipped.

The "unittest runner" is extremely rudimentary and lacks many important features. That is why I use the much more feature rich `zope.testrunner`. I could implement the `__unittest_skip__` logic there - but as you wrote - this should remain encapsulated inside `unittest` (that's why I wrote this issue).

I attach a test script - which likely is not convincing as the feature is mainly important for a sophisticated test runner, not for explicit calls of `TestCase.debug`.