HtaccessTest includes a number of empty file fixtures used to detect if the htaccess file is correctly configured - among those are composer.json and composer.lock.
There are many security, compliance, license policy and other tools that recursively scan for package management manifests (since they need to work in a variety of environments and on tools with multiple/nested software stacks).
Having an empty file can break these tools - for example Trivy fails with failed to get libraries: error with var/www/html/html/core/modules/system/tests/fixtures/HtaccessTest/composer.lock: EOF. Composer (which may be called with composer outdated --minor-only for example) with "./composer.json" does not contain valid JSON.
Having files exist that breaks tooling raises the barrier for adoption and leads to workarounds - adding 2 characters to each file doesn't affect the function of HtaccessTest.
Fixed
10.1 ✨
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It's likely this issue predates Contrib.social: some issue and comment data are missing.
Triggered for 10.1 but don't see any harm in empty brackets in the fixtures. Correct me if wrong.
Automatically closed - issue fixed for 2 weeks with no activity.