@kim removed it in https://github.com/protobuf-ruby/beefcake/commit/3b44e25bb78147cec3f4d3de3857f2cb77547fc6, as he thought it was cruft.  I would tend to agree, as I see no test errors after it was removed.  I noticed some problems when I rebased his changes into master and manually corrected them.  If it needs to remain, I can return it.