nose.tools.eq_ vs assertEqual

The Problem:

We've been using nose test runner for quite a while.

From time to time, I see our tests having eq_() calls:

eq_(actual, expected)

instead of the common:

self.assertEqual(actual, expected)

The question:

Is there any benefit of using nose.tools.eq_ as opposed to the standard unittest framework's assertEqual()? Are they actually equivalent?

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Thoughts:

Well, for one, eq_ is shorter, but it has to be imported from nose.tools which makes the tests dependent on the test runner library which can make it more difficult to switch to a different test runner, say py.test. On the other hand, we are also using @istest, @nottest and @attr nose decorators a lot.