We try to parse the "author" line out of a commit buffer. We handle the
case that split_ident_line() doesn't work, but we don't do any error
checking that we found an "author" line in the first place! This would
cause us to segfault on such a corrupt object.
Let's put in an explicit NULL check (we can just die(), which is what a
bogus split would do, too). As a bonus, this silences a warning when
compiling with gcc 9.2.1 using "-flto -O3", which claims that ident_len
may be uninitialized (it would only be if we had a NULL here).