https://bugs.launchpad.net/testtools/+bug/1245672 was filed on testtools recently. It would be easier to fix that if there was some way that something loading a test suite could check to see if there were import errors. The current code nicely works in the case where folk run the tests - so we should keep that behaviour, but also accumulate a list somewhere.

One possibility would be on the returned top level suite; another place would be on the loader itself. Or a new return type where we return a tuple of (suite, failures), but thats a more intrusive API change.

Any preference about how to solve this? I will work up a patch given some minor direction.