The code line above has been in caldav since my refactoring of the search-method in revision 2f22085 - I don't remember the rationale for this one at the moment, so it's needed to reinvestigate this one.
I've been running the caldav test suite towards lots of servers without hitting this code line - but a user utilizing DavMail gateway and plann has managed to hit it, ref tobixen/plann#26