"brian m. carlson" [off-list ref] writes:
quoted
Don't test "any number of '0'"; test 40 '0's. This is because the
line format was designed to be usable by things like /etc/magic to
detect format-patch output, and we want to notice if/when we break
that aspect of our output format.
My idea was to future-proof it against changes in the hash function,
although that's in the distant future.
Making sure that the test fails when somebody accidentally lengthens
(or fails to truncate to 40-hex, when you start using a longer hash)
the displayed name there is a good future-proofing.
Thanks.