Jeff King authored Apr 01, 2010 and Junio C Hamano committed Apr 01, 2010

Until now, this has been part of the commit-tree builtin.
However, it is already used by other builtins (like commit,
merge, and notes), and it would be useful to access it from
library code.

The check_valid helper has to come along, too, but is given
a more library-ish name of "assert_sha1_type".

Otherwise, the code is unchanged. There are still a few
rough edges for a library function, like printing the utf8
warning to stderr, but we can address those if and when they
come up as inappropriate.

Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>