Jonathan Nieder [off-list ref] writes:
daae1922 (fsck: check ident lines in commit objects, 2010-04-24)
taught fsck to expect commit objects to have the form
tree <object name>
<parents>
author <valid ident string>
committer <valid ident string>
log message
The check is overly strict: for example, it errors out with the
message “expected blank line” for perfectly valid commits with an
"encoding ISO-8859-1" line.
...
Thanks.