parseIdentity refused an identity carrying an empty address twice over, once as `open + 1 == close` and again as `email.len == 0`. That is not malformed input. Setting `user.email` to the empty string is ordinary git configuration; `git fast-export` writes the identity with an empty angle-bracket pair, and `git fast-import` reads that same stream back to the same commit. The construct is valid by git's own definition on both sides of its own tooling, and we rejected it.

The cost was not cosmetic. Two such commits, reachable only through a merge's second parent, aborted the import of an entire 437 commit repository with `import-git: import failed: Malformed`, naming neither the line nor the rule.

Only the email clauses are relaxed. The name clauses stay: git's own porcelain refuses an empty ident name, and the importer maps the identity's name onto the U card login, so a nameless identity would produce a nameless check-in. The two questions were conflated in a single condition, which is a large part of why this went unnoticed, so the guard now separates them and says why.

This is the third defect on this branch of the same shape: a property of our own fixtures promoted into a rule about the world. The first two were bounds tuned to the width of our benchmark corpus. This one is sharper, a refusal of input the tool we integrate with emits by default. Every identity fixture in the parser tests carried a non-empty email, so a uniform corpus could not falsify a rule that keys on emptiness.

Both tests are witnesses rather than decoration: each fails with Malformed against the previous parser and passes against this one. The unit test pins the construct and the empty-name refusal beside it; the differential test has git itself produce the commit and then asserts the imported check-in carries the login mohye77 rather than an empty user. check-in: 1f21f96558 user: dmestas tags: sub-manifest