Comment 1 for bug 1089792

Which version of bzr are you running? Here's what I get when I try the test case:
rwilbur@ordinate:~/src/bzr_test$ bzr status
added:
  args
rwilbur@ordinate:~/src/bzr_test$ export EDITOR='/home/rwilbur/src/bzr_test/args -a "" -t'
rwilbur@ordinate:~/src/bzr_test$ printf "%s\n" $EDITOR
/home/rwilbur/src/bzr_test/args
-a
""
-t
rwilbur@ordinate:~/src/bzr_test$ bzr commit
Committing to: /home/rwilbur/src/bzr_test/
added args
'/home/rwilbur/src/bzr_test/args'
'-a'
'""'
'-t'
'bzr_log.8Edb8D'
aborting commit write group: BzrCommandError(empty commit message specified)
bzr: ERROR: empty commit message specified
rwilbur@ordinate:~/src/bzr_test$ bzr --version
Bazaar (bzr) 2.1.4