Ah, good question. I wondered if this was going to be asked.

I originally had it as a constant. But when I used @mock.patch, the mock wasn't being used. Moving it to a function and having validate_config call into it got it so that my validate_config tests could mock out one or more of these.

I'm open to changing it if I was using mock wrong. If there's not a different solution, I'll add a doc in here that says why this exists; I almost did but decided against it, which was apparently the wrong decision :)