git-rebase -i prunes commits with empty commit-message

I'm in the process of converting an SVN repo to Git, and in the process I found one quite disturbing feature of git-rebase--interactive.sh: It discards commits with empty commit messages!

Here's a recepie for reproducing the issue: --->8--- git init git commit -m "dummy" --allow-empty git commit -m "dummy" --allow-empty git commit -m "dummy" --allow-empty git filter-branch -f --msg-filter 'sed -e "s/dummy//"' git rebase -i HEAD~2 --->8---

The editor window will show "noop", and exiting the editor goes ahead and deletes all but the initial commit.

This gets even weirder if it's a mixture of empty and non-empty commits; the commit-identifiers gets appended, together with an angle-bracket ('>'), to the previous line.

I'm guessing that this is unintended behavior. This was observed on git 1.7.0.1.