What's the best way to unit test protected & private methods in Ruby?

Question

What\'s the best way to unit test protected and private methods in Ruby, using the standard Ruby Test::Unit framework?

I\'m sure somebody will pipe up a

Answer 1

I'm sure somebody will pipe up and dogmatically assert that "you should only unit test public methods; if it needs unit testing, it shouldn't be a protected or private method", but I'm not really interested in debating that.

You could also refactor those into a new object in which those methods are public, and delegate to them privately in the original class. This will allow you to test the methods without magic metaruby in your specs while yet keeping them private.

I've got several methods that are protected or private for good and valid reasons

What are those valid reasons? Other OOP languages can get away without private methods at all (smalltalk comes to mind - where private methods only exist as a convention).