Raising SkipTest when in a tearDown method is reported as an error, rather than a skipped test. Now doing this sounds like a weird use case, but it would be actually useful when you have a worker thread, and the tearDown method collects the exception raised in that thread and raises it again. For the worker thread to be able to use skipTest(), a SkipTest exception raised in tearDown should be properly reported as a skip.
Interesting use case. If the test has not yet failed this is fine. The problem is that if an exception has *already* been raised then it will already have been added to the result - so by then skipping is meaningless (or contradictory - the test can fail *and* skip).
Attaching patch which adds support for registering a skip when raised from tearDown. Per Michael's point regarding failed tests, this is only handled if the test has been successful when SkipTest is raised from tearDown.
Committed revision 87390. It is a stretch to see this as a bugfix rather than a new feature so probably *shouldn't* be backported to 2.7. On the other hand the fix is combined with the fix for issue 9857 which *is* a bugfix and *should* be backported to Python 2.7.
